
Class N g844 

Book 3&X- 

CoBiightlil" 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr. 



J 



BOOKS BY W. C. BROWNELL 

PUBLISHED BY 

Charles Scribner's Sons 

French Traits. An Essay in Compara- 
tive Criticism $1.50 

French Art. Classic and Contemporary- 
Painting and Sculpture $1.50 

The Same. Illustrated Edition. With For- 
ty-eight Full-page Plates .... $3.75 net 

Victorian Prose Masters. . . $1.50 net 



FRENCH ART 



CLASSIC AND CONTEMPOBABY PAINTING 
AND SCULPTUBE 



BY 

W. C. BROWNELL 



NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1905 






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Copyright, 1892, 1905, by 
CHAKLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



THE DE VINNE PRESS 



TO AUGUSTS RODIN 



NOTE 

The present edition of this book contains a chap- 
ter on '* Kodin and the Institute," the addition of 
which makes the text identical with that of the 
illustrated edition of 1901. This chapter con- 
siders further what was a dozen years ago, when 
the volume was first published, altogether a " new 
movement in sculpture/^ and in so doing considers 
the chief phase of French Art developed since then. 

April, 1905 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

L Classic Paintestg, 1 

I. Character and origin. 
II. Claude and Poussin. 

III. Lebrun and Lesueur. 
rV. Louis Quinze. 

V. Greuze and Chardin. 
VI. David, Ingres, and Prudlion. 

II. Romantic Painting, » 47 

I. Romanticism. 
n. Gericault and Delacroix. 
in. The Fontainebleau Group. 

IV. The Academic Painters. 

V. Couture, Puvis de Chavannes, and Regnault. 

IIL Realistic Painting, 89 

I. Realism. 

n. Courbet and Bastien-Lepage. 
m. The Landscape Painters ; Fromentin and 

Guillaumet. 
rV. Historical and Portrait Painters. 
V. Baudrj, Delaunaj, Bonvin, VoUon, Gervex, 
Duez, Roll, L'Hermitte, Lerolle, Beraud, 
The Illustrators. 
VI. Manet and Monet. 
Vn. Impressionism ; Degas. 
Vni. The Outlook. 



X CONTEN^TS. 

PAGE 

IV. Classic Schlptube, 139^ 

I. Claux Sluters. 
II. Jean Goujon. 

III. Style. 

IV. Clodion, Pradier, and Etex. 

V. Houdon, David d' Angers, and Rude. 
VI. Carpeaux and Barye. 

V. Academic Sculpture, 165 

I. Its Italianate Character. 
II. Chapu. 

III. Dubois. 

IV. Saint-Marceaux and Mercie. 
V. Tyranny of Style. 

VI. Falguiere, Barrias, Delaplanche, and Le 
Feuvre. 
VII. Fremiet. 
VIII. The Institute School in General. 

VI. The New Movement in Sculpture, . . 205 
I. Rodin. 
II. Daloa. 

VII. Rodin and the Institute, .... 241 

I. Rodin's Present Position. 

II. His Gothic Leanings. 

III. Distinction from the Institute Sculptors. 

rV. His Nature-Worship. 

V. His Temperament. 

VI. His Sense of Design. 

VII. His Ideality. 

VIII. His Detail. 



I 

CLASSIC PAINTING 



CLASSIC PAINTING 



More than that of any other modern people 
French art is a national expression. It epitomizes 
very definitely the national sesthetic judgment and 
feeling, and if its manifestations are even more 
varied than are elsewhere to be met with, they 
share a certain character that is very salient. Of 
almost any French picture or statue of any modern 
epoch one's first thought is that it is French. The 
national quite overshadows the personal quality. 
In the field of the fine arts, as in nearly every other 
in which the French genius shows itseK, the results 
are evident of an intellectual co-operation which 
insures the development of a common standard and 
tends to subordinate idiosyncrasy. The fine arts, 
as well as every other department of mental activity, 
reveal the effect of that social instinct which is so 
much more powerful in France than it is anywhere 
else, or has ever been elsewhere, except possibly in 
the case of the Athenian republic. Add to this in- 
fluence that of the intellectual as distinguished 



4 FRENCH AET 

from the sensuous instinct, and one has, I think, the 
key to this salient characteristic of French art 
which strikes one so sharply and always as so 
plainly French. As one walks through the French 
rooms at t'he Louvre, through the galleries of the 
Luxembourg, through the unending rooms of the 
Salon he is impressed by the splendid competence 
everywhere displayed, the high standard of culture 
universally attested, by the overwhelming evidence 
that France stands at the head of the modern 
world aesthetically — but not less, I think, does one 
feel the absence of imagination, opportunity, of 
spirituality, of poetij in a word. The French 
themselves feel something of this. At the great 
Exposition of 1889 no pictures were so much 
admired by them as the English, in which appeared, 
even to an excessive degree, just the qualities in 
which French art is lacking, and which less than 
those of any other school showed traces of the now 
all but universal influence of French art. The 
most distinct and durable impression left by any 
exhibition of French pictures is that the French 
aesthetic genius is at once admirably artistic and 
extremely little poetic. 

It is a corollary of the predominance of the in- 
tellectual over the sensuous instinct that the true 
should be preferred to the beautiful, and some 
French critics are so far from denying this prefer- 



CLASSIC PAINTINGS 

ence of Frencli art that they express pride in it, and, 
indeed, defend it in a way that makes one feel 
slightly amateurish and fanciful in thinking of 
beauty apart from truth. A walk through the 
Louvre, however, suffices to restore one's confidence 
in his own convictions. The French rooms, at least 
until modern periods are reached, are a demonstra- 
tion that in the sphere of aesthetics science does not 
produce the greatest artists — that something other 
than intelligent interest and technical accomplish- 
ment are requisite to that end, and that system is 
fatal to spontaneity. M. Eugene Veron is the 
mouthpiece of his countrymen in asserting absolute 
beauty to be an abstraction, but the practice of the 
mass of French painters is, by comparison with 
that of the great Italians and Dutchmen, eloquent 
of the lack of poetry that results from a scepticism 
of abstractions. The French classic painters — and 
the classic-spirit, in spite of every force that the 
modern world brings to its destruction, persists 
wonderfully in France — show little absorption, little 
delight in their subject. Contrasted with the great 
names in painting they are eclectic and traditional, 
too purely expert. They are too cultivated to in- 
vent. Selection has taken the place of discovery in 
their inspiration. They are addicted to the rational 
and the regulated. Their substance is never senti- 
mental and incommunicable. Their works have a 



(5 FRENCH AKT 

distinctly professional air. They distrust what can- 
not be expressed ; what can only be suggested does 
not seem to them worth the trouble of trying to 
conceive. Beside the world of mystery and the 
wealth of emotion forming an imaginative penum- 
bra around such a design as Raphael's Vision of 
Ezekiel, for instance, Poussin's treatment of es- 
sentially the same subject is a diagram. 

On the other hand, qualities intimately associated 
with these defects are quite as noticeable in the old 
French rooms of the Louvre. Clearness, compact- 
ness, measure, and balance are evident in nearly 
every canvas. Everywhere is the air of reserve, of 
intellectual good-breeding, of avoidance of extrava- 
gance. That French painting is at the head of 
contemporary painting, as far and away incontest- 
ably it is, is due to the fact that it alone has kept 
alive the traditions of art which, elsewhere than in 
France, have given place to other and more material 
ideals. From the first its practitioners have been 
artists rather than poets, have possessed, that is to 
say, the constructive rather than the creative, the 
organizing rather than the imaginative tempera- 
ment, but they have rarely been perfunctory and 
never common. French painting in its preference 
of truth to beauty, of intelligence to the beatific 
vision, of form to color, in a word, has nevertheless, 
and perhaps a fortiori^ always been the expression 



CLASSIC PAINTING 7 

of ideas. These ideas almost invariably have been 
expressed in rigorous form — form which at times 
fringes the lifelessness of symbohsm. But even less 
frequently, I think, than other peoples have the 
French e'xhibited in their painting that content- 
ment with painting in itself that is the dry rot of 
art. With all their addiction to truth and form 
they have followed this ideal so systematically that 
they have never suffered it to become mechanical, 
merely formal — as is so often the case elsewhere 
(in England and among ourselves, everyone will 
have remarked) in instances whei'e form has been 
mainly considered and where sentiment happens 
to be lacking. Even when care for form is so ex- 
cessive as to imply an absence of character, the 
form itself is apt to be so distinguished as itself to 
supply the element of character, and character con- 
sequently particularly refined and immaterial. And 
one quahty is always present : elegance is always 
evidently aimed at and measurably achieved. 
Native or foreign, real or factitious as the inspira- 
tion of French classicism may be, the sense of style 
and of that perfection of style which we know as 
elegance is invariably noticeable in its productions. 
So that, we may say, from Poussin to Puvis de 
Chavannes, from Clouet to Meissonier, taste — a re- 
fined and cultivated sense of what is sound, esti- 
mable, competent, reserved, satisfactory, up to the 



8 FRENCH ART 

mark, and above all, elegant and distinguished — has 
been at once the arbiter and the stimulus of ex- 
cellence in French painting. It is this which has 
made the France of the past three centuries, and 
especially the France of to-day — as we get farther 
and fai'ther away from the great art epochs — both 
in amount and general excellence of artistic activity, 
comparable only with the Italy of the Renaissance 
and the Greece of antiquity. 

Moreover, it is an error to assume, because form 
in French painting appeals to us more striking- 
ly than substance, that French painting is lack- 
ing in substance. In its perfection form appeals 
to every appreciation ; it is in art, one may say, the 
one universal language. But just in proportion as 
form in a work of art approaches perfection, or uni- 
versality, just in that proportion does the substance 
which it clothes, which it expresses, seem unim- 
portant to those to whom this substance is foreign. 
Some critics have even fancied, for example, that 
Greek architecture and sculpture — the only Greek 
art we know anything about — were chiefly con- 
cerned with form, and that the ideas behind their 
perfection of form were very simple and elementary 
ideas, not at all comparable in complexity and elab- 
orateness with those that confuse and distinguish 
the modern world. When one comes to French art 
it is still more difficult for us to realize that the 



CLASSIC PAINTi:S'G 9 

ideas underlying its expression are ideas of import, 
validity, and attachment. The truth is largely that 
French ideas are not our ideas ; not that the French 
who — except possibly the ancient Greeks and the 
modern Germans — of all peoples in the world are, 
as one may say, addicted to ideas, are lacking in 
them. Technical excellence is simply the insepara- 
ble accompaniment, the outward expression of the 
kind of aesthetic ideas the French are enamoured of. 
Their substance is not our substance, but while it is 
perfectly legitimate for us to criticise their substance 
it is idle to maintain that they are lacking in sub- 
stance. If we call a painting by Poussin pure style, 
a composition of David merely the perfection of 
convention, one of M. Kochegrosse's dramatic can- 
vasses the rhetoric of technic and that only, we miss 
something. We miss the idea, the substance, behind 
these varying expressions. These are not the less 
real for being foreign to us. They are less spiritual 
and more material, less poetic and spontaneous, 
more schooled and traditional than we like to see 
associated with such adequacy of expression, but 
they are not for that reason more mechanical. 
They are ideas and substance that lend themselves 
to technical expression a thousand times more read- 
ily than do oui's. They are, in fact, exquisitely 
adapted to technical expression. 

The substance and ideas which we desire fully ex- 



10 FRENCH ART 

pressed in color, form, or words are, indeed, very 
exactly in proportion to our esteem of them, inex- 
pressible. We like hints of the unutterable, sug- 
gestions of significance that is mysterious and import 
that is incalculable. The light that " never was on 
sea or land " is the illumination we seek. The 
*' Heaven," not the atmosphere that "lies about us " 
in our mature age as "in our infancy," is what ap- 
peals most strongly to our subordination of the in- 
tellect and the senses to the imagination and the 
soul. Nothing with us very deeply impresses the 
mind if it does not arouse the emotions. Naturally, 
thus, we are predisposed insensibly to infer from 
French articulateness the absence of substance, to 
assume from the triumphant facility and felicity of 
French expression a certain insignificance of what is 
expressed. Inferences and assumptions based on 
temperament, however, almost invariably have the 
vice of superficiality, and it takes no very prolonged 
study of French art for candor and intelligence to 
perceive that if its substance is weak on the senti- 
mental, the emotional, the poetic, the spiritual side, 
it is exceptionally strong in rhetorical, artistic, culti- 
vated, aesthetically elevated ideas, as well as in that 
technical excellence which alone, owing to our own 
inexpertness, first strikes and longest impresses us. 
When we have no ideas to express, in a word, we 
rarely save our emptiness by any appearance of 



CLASSIC PAINTIl^G 11 

clever expression. When a Frenchman expresses 
ideas for which we do not care, with which we are 
temperamentally out of sympathy, we assume that 
his expression is equally empty. Matthew Arnold 
cites a passage from Mr. Palgrave, and comments 
significantly on it, in this sense. "The style," ex- 
claims Mr. Palgrave, " which has filled London with 
the dead monotony of Gower or Harley Streets, or 
the pale commonplace of Belgravia, Tyburnia, and 
Kensington ; which has pierced Paris and Madrid 
with the feeble frivolities of the Rue Eivoli and the 
Strada de Toledo." Upon which Arnold observes 
that *' the architecture of the Rue Rivoli expresses 
show, splendor, pleasure, unworthy things, perhaps, 
to express alone and for their own sakes, but it ex- 
presses them ; whereas, the architecture of Gower 
Street and Belgravia merely expresses the impotence 
of the architect to express anything." 

And in characterizing the turn for poetry in 
French painting as comparatively inferior, it will be 
understood at once, I hope, that I am comparing it 
with the imaginativeness of the great Italians and 
Dutchmen, and with Rubens and Holbein and 
Turner, and not asserting the supremacy in elevated 
sentiment over Claude and Corot, Chardin, and 
Cazin, of the Royal Academy, or the New York 
Society of American Artists. And so far as an abso- 
lute rather than a comparative standard may be ap- 



12 FEENCH ART 

plied in matters so much too vast for any hope of 
adequate treatment according to either method, we 
ought never to forget that in criticising French 
painting, as well as other things French, we are 
measuring it by an ideal that now and then we 
may appreciate better than Frenchmen, but rarely 
illustrate as welL 



Furthermore, the qualities and defects of French 
painting — the predominance in it of national over 
individual force and distinction, its turn for style, 
the kind of ideas that inspire its substance, its 
classic spirit in fine — are explained hardly less by its 
historic origin than by the character of the French 
genius itself. French painting really began in con- 
noisseurship, one may say. It arose in appreciation, 
that faculty in which the French have always been, 
and still are, unrivalled. Its syntheses were based 
on elements already in combination. It originated 
nothing. It was eclectic at the outset. Compared 
with the slow and suave evolution of Italian art, in 
whose earliest dawn its borrowed Byzantine painting 
served as a stimulus and suggestion to original 
views of natural material rather than as a model for 
imitation and modification, the painting that sprang 
into existence, Minerva-like, in full armor, at Fon- 



CLASSIC PAINTING 13 

tainebleau under Francis L, was of the essence of 
artificiality. The court of France was far more 
splendid than, and equally enlightened with, that of 
Florence. The monarch felt his title to Maecenas- 
ship as justified as that of the Medici. He created, 
accordingly, French painting out of hand — I mean, 
at all events, the French painting that stands at the 
beginning of the line of the present tradition. He 
summoned Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, Kossi, Pri- 
maticcio, and founded the famous Fontainebleau 
school. Of necessity it was Italianate. It had no 
Giotto, Masaccio, Eaphael behind it. Italian was 
the best art going ; French appreciation was edu- 
cated and keen ; its choice between evolution and 
adoption was inevitable. It was very much in the 
position in which American appreciation finds itself 
to-day. Like our own painters, the French artists 
of the Renaissance found themselves familiar with 
master-pieces whoUy beyond their power to create, 
and produced by a foreign people who had enjoyed 
the incomparable advantage of arriving at their ar- 
tistic apogee through natural stages of growth, begin- 
ning with impulse and culminating in expertness. 

The situation had its advantages as well as its 
drawbacks, certainly. It saved French painting an 
immense amount of fumbling, of laborious experi- 
mentation, of crudity, of failure. But it stamped it 
with an essential artificiality from which it did not 



14 FRENCH ART 

fully recover for over two hundred years, until, in« 
sensibly, it had built up its own traditions and 
gradually brought about its own inherent develop- 
ment. In a word, French painting had an intel- 
lectual rather than an emotional origin. Its first 
practitioners were men of culture rather than of feel- 
ing ; they were inspired by the artistic, the construc- 
tive, the fashioning, rather than the poetic, spirit. 
And so evident is this inclination in even contem- 
porary French painting — and indeed in all French 
sesthetic expression — that it cannot be ascribed whol- 
ly to the circumstances mentioned. The circum- 
stances themselves need an explanation, and find it in 
the constitution itself of the French mind, which 
(owing, doubtless, to other circumstances, but that 
is extraneous) is fundamentally less imaginative and 
creative than co-ordinating and constructive. 

Naturally thus, when the Italian influence wore 
itself out, and the Fontainebleau school gave way 
to a more purely national art ; when France had 
definitely entered into her Italian heritage and had 
learned the lessons that Holland and Flanders had 
to teach her as well ; when, in fine, the art of the 
modern world began, it was an art of grammar, of 
rhetoric. Certainly up to the time of Gericault 
painting in general held itself rather pedantically 
aloof from poetry. Claude, Chardin, what may be 
called the illustrated vers de societe of the Louis 



CLASSIC PAINTING 15 

Quinze painters — of Watteau and Fragonard — even 
Prudhon, did little to change the prevailing color 
and tone. Claude's art is, in manner, thoroughly 
classic. His personal influence was perhaps first 
felt by Corot. He stands by himseK, at any rate, 
quite apart. He was the first thoroughly original 
French painter, if indeed one may not say he was 
the first thoroughly original modern painter. He 
has been assigned to both the French and Italian 
schools — to the latter by Gallophobist critics, how- 
ever, through a partisanship which in aesthetic mat- 
ters is ridiculous ; there was in his day no Italian 
school for him to belong to. The truth is that he 
passed a large part of his life in Italy and that his 
landscape is Italianate. But more conspicuously 
still, it is ideal — ideal in the sense intended by 
Goethe in saying, " There are no landscapes in 
nature like those of Claude." There are not, in- 
deed. Nature has been transmuted by Claude's 
alchemy with lovelier results than any other painter 
— save always Corot, shall I say ? — has ever 
achieved. Witness the pastorals at Madrid, in the 
Doria Gallery at Eome, the *' Dido and JBneas " at 
Dresden, the sweet and serene superiority of the 
National Gallery canvases over the struggling com- 
petition manifest in the Turners juxtaposed to them 
through the unlucky ambition of the great English 
painter. Mr. Euskin says that Claude could paint 



16 FKENCH AET 

a small wave very well, and acknowledges that he 
effected a revolution in art, which revolution " con- 
sisted mainly in setting the sun in heavens." 
" Mainly " is delightful, but Claude's excellence con- 
sists in his ability to paint visions of loveliness, pict- 
ures of pure beauty, not in his skill in observing the 
drawing of wavelets or his happy thought of paint- 
ing sunlight. Mr. George Moore observes ironically 
of Mr. Ruskin that his grotesque depreciation of 
Mr. Whistler — "the lot of critics" being "to be re- 
membered by what they have failed to understand " 
— " will survive his finest prose passage." I am not 
sure about Mr. Whistler. Contemporaries are too 
near for a perfect critical perspective. But assured- 
ly Mr. Ruskin's failure to perceive Claude's point of 
view — to perceive that Claude's aim and Stanfield's, 
say, were quite different ; that Claude, in fact, was 
at the opposite pole from the botanist and the geol- 
ogist whom ]\li\ Ruskin's " reverence for nature " 
would make of every landscape painter — is a failure 
in appreciation than to have shown which it would 
be better for him as a critic never to have been 
born. It seems hardly fanciful to say that the de- 
preciation of Claude by Mr. Ruskin, who is a land- 
scape painter himself, using the medium of words 
instead of pigments, is, so to speak, professionally 
unjust. 

" Go out, in the springtime, among the meadows 



CLASSIC PAINTIT^G 17 

that slope from the shores of the Swiss lakes to the 
roots of their lower mountains. There, mingled 
with the taller gentians and the white narcissus, the 
grass grows deep and free ; and as you follow the 
winding mountain paths, beneath arching boughs 
all veiled and dim with blossom — paths that forever 
droop and rise over the green banks and mounds 
sweeping down in scented undulation, steep to the 
blue water, studded here and there with new-mown 
heaps, filling the air with fainter sweetness — look 
up toward the higher hills, where the waves of ever- 
lasting green roll silently into their long inlets 
among the shadows of the pines.'* 

Claude's landscape is not Swiss, but if it were it 
would awaken in the beholder a very similar sensa- 
tion to that aroused in the reader of this famous 
passage. Claude indeed painted landscape in pre- 
cisely this way. He was perhaps the first — though 
priority in such matters is trivial beside pre-emi- 
nence — who painted effects instead of things. Light 
and air were his material, not ponds and rocks and 
clouds and trees and stretches of plain and moun- 
tain outlines. He first generalized the phenomena 
of inanimate nature, and in this he remains still un- 
surpassed. But, superficially, his scheme wore the 
classic aspect, and neither his contemporaries nor 
his successors, for over two hundred years, dis- 
covered the immense value of his point of view. 



18 FRENCH ART 

and the puissant charm of his way of rendering 
nature. 

Poussin, however, was the incarnation of the 
classic spirit, and perhaps the reason why a disin- 
terested foreigner finds it difficult to appreciate the 
French estimate of him is that no foreigner, however 
disinterested, can quite appreciate the French ap- 
preciation of the classic spirit in and for itself. But 
when one listens to expressions of admiration for 
the one French '* old master," as one may call 
Poussin without invidiousness, it is impossible not 
to scent chauvinism, as one scents it in the German 
panegyrics of Goethe, for example. He was a very 
great painter, beyond doubt. And as there were 
great men before Agamemnon there have been 
great painters since Kaphael and Titian, even since 
Kembrandt and Velasquez. He had a strenuous 
personality, moreover. You know a Poussin at 
once when you see it. But to find the suggestion 
of the infinite, the Shakesperian touch in his work 
seems to demand the imaginativeness of M. Victor 
Cherbuliez. When Mr. Matthew Arnold ventured 
to remark to Sainte-Beuve that he could not con- 
sider Lamartine as a very important poet, Sainte- 
Beuve replied : "He was important to us." Many 
critics, among them one severer than Sainte-Beuve, 
the late Edmond Scherer, have given excellent rea- 
sons for Lamartine's absolute as well as relative im- 



CLASSIC PAIKTIiq^G 19 

portance, and perhaps it is a failure in appreciation 
on our part that is really responsible for our feeling 
that Poussin is not quite the great master the 
French deem him. Assuredly he might justifiably 
apply to himself the " Et-Ego-in-Arcadia " inscrip- 
tion in one of his most famous paintings. And the 
specific service he performed for French painting 
and the relative rank he occupies in it ought not to 
obscure his purely personal qualities, which, if not 
transcendent, are incontestably elevated and fine. 

His qualities, however, are very thoroughly 
French qualities — poise, rationality, science, the 
artistic dominating the poetic faculty, and style 
quite outshining significance and suggestion. He 
learned all he knew of art, he said, from the Bacchus 
Torso at Naples. But he was eclectic rather than 
imitative, and certainly used the material he found 
in the works of his artistic ancestors as freely and 
personally as Kaphael the frescos of the Baths of 
Titus, or Donatello the fragments of antique sculpt- 
ure. From his time on, indeed, French painting- 
dropped its Italian leading-strings. He might 
often suggest Eaphael — and any painter who sug 
gests Eaphael inevitably suffers for it — but always 
with an individual, a native, a French difference, 
and he is as far removed in spirit and essence from 
the Fontainebleau school as the French genius it- 
seK is from the Italian which presided there. In 



20 FRENCH ART 

Poussin, indeed, the French genius first asserts it- 
self in painting. And it asserts itself splendidly in 
him. 

We who ask to be moved as well as impressed, 
who demand satisfaction of the susceptibility as 
well as — shall we say rather than ? — interest of the 
intelligence, may feel that for the qualities in which 
Poussin is lacking those in which he is rich afford 
no compensation whatever. But I confess that in 
the presence of even that portion of Poussin's mag- 
nificent accomplishment which is spread before one 
in the Louvre, to wish one's self in the Stanze of 
the Vatican or in the Sistine Chapel, seems to me an 
unintelligent sacrifice of one's opportunities. 



m 



It is a sure mark of narrowness and defective 
powers of perception to fail to discover the point of 
view even of what one disesteems. We talk of 
Poussin, of Louis Quatorze art — as of its revival 
under David and its continuance in Ingres — of, in 
general, modern classic art as if it were an art of 
convention merely ; whereas, conventional as it is, 
its conventionality is — or was, certainly, in the 
seventeenth century — very far from being pure 
formulary. It was genuinely expressive of a certain 
order of ideas intelligently held, a certain set of 



CLASSIC PAINTIlSra 21 

principles sincerely believed in, a view of art as 
positive and genuine as the revolt against the 
tyrannous system into which it developed. We 
are simply out of sympathy with its aim, its ideal ; 
perhaps, too, for that most frivolous of all reasons 
because we have grown tired of it. 

But the business of intelligent criticism is to be 
in touch with everything. "Tout comprendre, 
c'est tout pardonner," as the French ethical maxim 
has it, may be modified into the true motto of aes- 
thetic criticism, "Tout comprendre, c'est tout jus- 
tifier." Of course, by " criticism " one does not 
mean pedagogy, as so many people constantly im- 
agine, nor does justifying everything include bad 
drawing. But as Lebrun, for example, is not nowa- 
days held up as a model to young painters, and is 
not to be accused of bad drawing, why do we so 
entirely dispense ourselves from comprehending 
him at all ? Lebrun is, perhaps, not a painter of 
enough personal importance to repay attentive con- 
sideration, and historic importance does not greatly 
concern criticism. But we pass him by on the 
ground of his conventionality, without remembering 
that what appears conventional to us was in his 
case not only sincerity but aggressive enthusiasm. 
If there ever was a painter who exercised what 
creative and imaginative faculty he had with an 
absolute gusto, Lebrun did so. He interested his 



22 FRENCH ART 

contemporaries immensely ; no painter ever ruled 
more unrivalled. He fails to interest us because we 
have another point of view. We believe in our 
point of view and disbelive in his as a matter of 
course ; and it would be self-contradict ory to say, 
in the interests of critical catholicity, that in our 
opinion his may be as sound as our own. But to 
say that he has no point of view whatever — to say, 
in general, that modern classic art is perfunctory 
and mere formulaiy — is to be guilty of what has 
always been the inherent vice of protestantism in 
all fields of mental activity. 

Nowhere has protestantism exhibited this defect 
more palpably than in the course of evolution of 
schools of painting. Pre-Kaphaelitism is perhaps 
the only exception, and pre-Kaphaelitism was a vio- 
lent and emotional counter-revolution rather than a 
movement characterized by catholicity of critical 
appreciation. Literary criticism is certainly full of 
similar intolerance ; though when Gautier talks 
about Racine, or Zola about " Mes Haines," or Mr. 
Ho wells about Scott, the polemic temper, the tem- 
per most opposed to the critical, is very generally 
recognized. And in spite of their admirable accom- 
phshment in various branches of literature, these 
writers will never quite recover from the misfortune 
of having preoccupied themselves as critics with the 
defects instead of the qualities of what is classic. 



CLASSIC PAINTIINTG 23 

Yet the protestantism of the successive schools of 
painting against the errors of their predecessors 
has something even more crass about it. Contem- 
porary painters and critics thoroughly alive, and 
fully in the contemporary aesthetic current, so far 
from appreciating modern classic art sympatheti- 
cally, are apt to admire the old masters themselves 
mainly on technical grounds, and not at all to enter 
into their general aesthetic attitude. The feeling of 
contemporary painters and critics (except, of course, 
historical critics) for Eaphael's genius is the oppo- 
site of cordial. We are out of touch with the 
"Disputa," with angels and prophets seated on 
clouds, with halos and wings, with such inconsist- 
encies as the *' Doge praying " in a picture of the 
marriage of St. Catherine, with the mystic mar- 
riage itself. Eaphael's grace of line and suave 
space - filling shapes are mainly what we think of; 
the rest we call convention. We are become literal 
and exacting, addicted to the pedantry of the pre- 
scriptive, if not of the prosaic. 

Take such a picture as M. Edouard Detaille's 
"Le Reve," which won him so much applause a 
few years ago. M. Detaille is an irreproachable 
realist, and may do what he likes in the way of the 
materially impossible with impunity. Sleeping 
soldiers, without a gaiter-button lacking, bivouack- 
ing on the ground amid stacked arms whose bay- 



24 FRENCH ART 

onets would prick ; above them in the heavens the 
clash of contending ghostly armies — wraiths born 
of the sleepers' dreams. That we are in touch with. 
No one would object to it except under penalty of 
being scouted as pitiably hteral. Yet the scheme 
is as thoroughly conventional — that is to say, it is 
as closely based on hypothesis universally assumed 
for the moment — as Lebrun's " Triumph of Alex- 
ander." The latter is as much a true expression of 
an ideal as Detaille's picture. It is an ideal now 
become more conventional, undoubtedly, but it is 
as clearly an ideal and as clearly genuine. The 
only point I wish to make is, that Lebrun's painting 
— Louis Quatorze painting — is not the perfunctory 
thing we are apt to assume it to be. That is not 
the same thing, I hope, as maintaining that M. Bou- 
guereau is significant rather than insipid. Lebrun 
was assuredly not a strikingly original painter. 
His crowds of warriors bear a much closer resem- 
blance to Raphael's " Battle of Constantine and 
Maxentius " than the " Transfiguration " of the 
Vatican does to Giotto's, aside from the important 
circumstance that the difference in the latter in- 
stance shows development, while the former illus- 
trates mainly an enfeebled variation. But there is 
unquestionably something of Lebrun in Lebrun's 
work — something typical of the age whose artistic 
spirit he so completely expressed. 



CLASSIC PAIJS^TINa 25 

To perceive that Louis Quatorze art is not all 
convention it is only necessary to remember that 
Lesueur is to be bracketed with Lebrun. All the 
sympathy which the Anglo-Saxon temperament 
withholds from the histrionism of Lebrun is in- 
stinctively accorded to his gentle and graceful con- 
temporary, who has been called — -faute de niieux, of 
course — the French Raphael. Really Lesueur is as 
nearly conventional as Lebrun. He has at any rate 
far less force ; and even if we may maintain that 
he had a more individual point of view, his works 
are assuredly more monotonous to the scrutinizing 
sense. It is impossible to recall any one of the 
famous San Bruno series with any particularity, or, 
except in subject, to distinguish these in the mem- 
ory from the sweet and soft " St. Scholastica " in 
the Salon Carre. With more sapience and less sen- 
sitiveness, Bouguereau is Lesueur's true successor, 
to say which is certainly not to affirm a very salient 
originality of the older painter. He had a great 
deal of very exquisite feeling for what is refined 
and elevated, but clearly it is a moral rather than an 
sesthetic delicacy that he exhibits, and sesthetically 
he exercises his sweeter and more sympathetic sen- 
sibihty within the same rigid limits which circum- 
scribe that of Lebrun. He has, indeed, less inven- 
tion, less imagination, less sense of composition, 
less wealth of detail, less elaborateness, no greater 



26 FREl^CH ART 

concentration or sense of effect ; and though his 
color is more agreeable, perhaps, in hue, it gets its 
tone through the absence of variety rather than 
through juxtapositions and balances. The truth is, 
that both equally illustrate the classic spirit, the 
spirit of their age par excellence and of French 
painting in general, in a supreme degree, though the 
conformability of the one is positive and of the 
other passive, so to say ; and that neither illustrates 
quite the subserviency to the conventional which 
we, who have undoubtedly just as many conventions 
of our own, are wont to ascribe to them, and to Le- 
brun in particular. 

IV 

Fanciful as the Louis Quinze art seems, by con- 
trast with that of Louis Quatorze, it, too, is essen- 
tially classic. It is free enough — no one, I think, 
would deny that — but it is very far from individual 
in any important sense. It has, to be sure, more 
personal feeling than that of Lesueur or Lebrun. 
The artist's susceptibility seems to come to the sur- 
face for the first time. Watteau, Fragonard — Frag- 
onard especially, the exquisite and impudent — are 
as gay, as spontaneous, as careless, as vivacious as 
Boldini. Boucher's goddesses and cherubs, disport- 
ing themselves in graceful abandonment on happily 
disposed clouds, outlined in cumulus masses against 



CLASSIC PAINTING 27 

unvarying azure, are as uni*estrained and indepen- 
dent of prescription as Monticelli's figures. Lan- 
cret, Pater, Nattier, and Van Loo — the very names 
suggest not merely freedom but a sportive and aban- 
doned license. But in what a narrow round they 
move ! How their imaginativeness is limited by 
their artificiality ! What a talent, what a genius 
they have for artificiality. It is the era par excel- 
lence of dilettantism, and nothing is less romantic 
than dilettantism. Their evident feeling — and evi- 
dently genuine feeling — is feeling for the factitious, 
for the manufactured, for what the French call the 
confectionne. Their romantic quality is to that of 
the modern Fontainebleau group as the exquisite 
vers de societe of Mr. Austin Dobson, say, is to the 
turbulent yet profound romanticism of Heine or 
Burns. Every picture painted by them would go as 
well on a fan as in a frame. All their material is 
traditional. They simply handle it as enfant s terri- 
bles. Intellectually speaking, they are painters of a 
silver age. Of ideas they have almost none. They 
are as baiTen of invention in any large sense as if 
they were imitators instead of, in a sense, the orig- 
inators of a new phase. Their originality is arrived 
at rather through exclusion than discovery. They 
simply drop pedantry and exult in irresponsibility. 
They are hardly even a school. 

Yet they have, one and all, in greater or less de- 



28 FRENCH AET 

gree, that distinct quality of cbarm which is eter- 
nally incompatible with routine. They are as little 
constructive as the age itself, as anything that we 
mean when we use the epithet Louis Quinze. Of 
everything thus indicated one predicates at once 
unconsciousness, the momentum of antecedent 
thought modified by the ease born of habit ; the 
carelessness due to having one's thinking done for 
one and the license of proceeding fancifully, whim- 
sically, even freakishly, once the lines and limits of 
one's action have been settled by more laborious, 
more conscientious philosophy than in such circum- 
stances one feels disposed to frame for one's self. 
There is no break with the Louis Quatorze things, 
not a symptom of revolt ; only, after them the del- 
uge ! But out of this very condition of things, and 
out of this attitude of mind, arises a new art, or 
rather a new phase of art, essentially classic, as I 
said, but nevertheless imbued with a character of 
its own, and this character distinctly charming. 
Wherein does the charm consist ? In two qualities, 
I think, one of which has not hitherto appeared in 
French painting, or, indeed, in any art whatever, 
namely, what we understand by cleverness as a dis- 
tinct element in treatment — and color. Color is 
very prominent nowadays in all writing about art, 
though recently it has given place, in the fashion of 
the day, to " values " and the realistic representation 



CLASSIC PAINTING 29 

of natural objects as the painter's proper aim. 
What precisely is meant by color would be difficult, 
perhaps, to define. A warmer general tone than is 
achieved by painters mainly occupied with line and 
mass is possibly what is oftenest meant by amateurs 
who profess themselves fond of color. At all events, 
the Louis Quinze painters, especially Watteau, Frag- 
onard, and Pater — and Boucher has a great deal of 
the same feeling — were sensitive to that vibration 
of atmosphere that blends local hues into the ensem- 
ble that produces tone. The ensemble of their 
tints is what we mean by color. Since the Vene- 
tians this note had not appeared. They constitute, 
thus, a sort of romantic interregnum — still very 
classic, from an intellectual point of view — between 
the classicism of Lebrun and the still greater sever- 
ity of David. Nothing in the evolution of French 
painting is more interesting than this reverberation 
of Tintoretto and Tiepolo. 

By cleverness, as exhibited by the Louis Quinze 
painters, I do not mean mere technical ability, but 
something more inclusive, something relating quite 
as much to attitude of mind as to dexterity of treat- 
ment. They conceive as cleverly as they execute. 
There is a sense of confidence and capability in the 
way they view, as well as in the way they handle, 
their light material. They know it thoroughly, and 
are thoroughly at one with it. And they exploit it 



30 FKENCH AET 

with a serene air of satisfaction, as if it were the 
only material in the world worth handling. Indeed, 
it is exquisitely adapted to their talent. So little 
significance has it that one may say it exists merely 
to be cleverly dealt with, to be represented, dis- 
tributed, compared, and generally utilized solely 
with reference to the display of the artist's jaunty 
skill. It is, one may say, merely the raw material 
for the production of an effect, and an effect de- 
manding only what we mean by cleverness ; no 
knowledge and love of nature, no prolonged study, 
no acquaintance with the antique, for example, no 
philosophy whatever — unless poco-curantism be 
called a philosophy, which eminently it is not. To 
be adequate to the requirements — rarely very exact- 
ing in any case — made of one, never to show stu- 
pidity, to have a great deal of taste and an instinct- 
ive feeling for what is elegant and refined, to abhor 
pedantry and take gayety at once lightly and seri- 
ously, and beyond this to take no thought, is to be 
clever ; and in this sense the Louis Quinze painters 
are the first, as they certainly are the typical, clever 
artists. 

In Louis Quinze art the subject is more than ef- 
faced to give free swing to technical cleverness ; it 
is itself contributory to such cleverness, and really 
a part of it. The artists evidently look on life, as 
they paint their pictures, as the web whereon to 



CLASSIC PAINTINGT 31 

sketch exhibitions of skill in the composition of 
sensation-provoking combinations — combinations, 
thus, provoking sensations of the lightest and least 
substantial kind. When you stand before one of 
Fragonard's bewitching models, modishly modified 
into a great — or rather a little — lady, you not only 
note the color — full of tone on the one hand and of 
variety on the other, besides exhibiting the happiest 
selective quality in warm and yet delicate hues and 
tints ; you not only, furthermore, observe the clever 
touch just poised between suggestion and expres- 
sion, coquettishly suppressing a detail here, and em- 
phasi2dng a characteristic there ; you feel, in addi- 
tion, that the entire object floats airily in an atmos- 
phere of cleverness ; that it is but a bit, an example, 
a miniature type of an environment wholly attuned 
to the note of cleverness — of competence, facility, 
grace, elegance, and other abstract but not at all 
abstruse qualities, quite unrelated to what, in any 
profound sense, at least, is concrete and vitally sig- 
nificant. Artificiality so permeated the Louis Quinze 
epoch, indeed, that one may say that natui-e itself 
was artificial — that is to say, all the nature Louis 
Quinze painters had to paint ; at least all they could 
have been called upon to think of painting. "What 
a distinction is, after all, theirs! To have created 
out of nothing, or next to nothing, something 
charming, and endui'ingly charming ; something of 



32 FRENCH ART 

a truly classic inspiration without dependence at 
bottom on the real and the actual ; something as 
little indebted to facts and things as a fairy tale, and 
withal marked by such qualities as color and clever- 
ness in so eminent a degree. 

The Louis Quinze painters may be said, indeed, 
to have had the romantic temperament with the 
classic inspiration. They have audacity rather than 
freedom, license modified by strict limitation to the 
lines within which it is exercised. But there can 
be no doubt that this limitation is more conspicu- 
ous in their charmingly irresponsible works than 
is, essentially speaking, their irresponsibility itself. 
They never give their imagination free play. Sport- 
ive and spontaneous as it appears, it is equally clear 
that its activities are bounded by conservatory con- 
fines. Watteau, born on the Flemish border, is al- 
most an exception. Temperament in him seems 
constantly on the verge of conquering tradition and 
environment. Now and then he seems to be on the 
point of emancipation, and one expects to come 
upon some work in which he has expressed himself 
and attested his ideality. But one is as constantly dis- 
appointed. His color and his cleverness are always 
admirable and winning, but his import is perversely 
— almost bewitchingly — slight. What was he think- 
ing of ? one asks, before his delightful canvases ; 
and one's conclusion inevitably is, certainly as near 



CLASSIC PAINTING- 33 

nothing at all as can be consistent with so much 
charm and so much real power. As to "Watteau, 
one's last thought is of what he would have been in 
a different sesthetic atmosphere, in an atmosphere 
that would have stimulated his really romantic 
temperament to extra-traditional flights, instead of 
confining it within the inexorable boundaries of 
classic custom ; an atmosphere favorable to the free 
exercise of his adorable fancy, instead of rigorously 
insistent on conforming this, so far as might be, to 
customary canons, and, at any rate, restricting its 
exercise to material a la mode. A little landscape 
in the La Caze collection in the Louvre, whose ro- 
mantic and truly poetic feehng agreeably pierces 
through its elegance, is eloquent of such reflections. 



With Greuze and Chardin we are supposed to get 
into so different a sphere of thought and feeling that 
the change has been called a " return to nature " — 
that " return to nature " of which we hear so much 
in histories of literature as well as of the plastic arts. 
The notion is not quite sound. Chardin is a painter 
who seems to me, at least, to stand quite apart, 
quite alone, in the development of Fi'ench painting, 
whereas there could not be a more marked instance 
of the inherence of the classic spirit in the French 



34 FRENCH ART 

aesthetic nature than is furnished by Greuze. The 
first French painter of genre, in the full modern 
sense of the term, the first true interpreter of scenes 
from humble life — of lowly incident and famihar 
situations, of broken jars and paternal curses, and 
buxom girls and precocious children — he certainly 
is. There is certainly nothing regence about him. 
But the beginning and end of Greuze's art is con- 
vention. He is less imaginative, less romantic, less 
real than the painting his replaced. That was at 
least a mirror of the ideals, the spirit, the society, of 
the day. A Louis Quinze fan is a genuine and spon- 
taneous product of a free and elastic aesthetic im- 
pulse beside one of his stereotyped sentimentali- 
ties. 

The truth is, Greuze is as sentimental as a bull- 
finch, but he has hardly a natural note in his gamut. 
Nature is not only never his model, she is never his 
inspiration. He is distinctively a literary painter ; 
but this description is not minute enough. His con- 
ventions are those not merely of the litterateur, but 
of the extremely conventional litterateur. An artless 
platitude is really more artificial than a clever para- 
dox ; it doesn't even cast a side-light on the natural 
material with which it deals. Greuze's genre is 
really a genre of his own — his own and that of kin- 
dred spirits since. It is as systematic and detached 
as the art of Poussin. The forms it embodies 



CLASSIC PAINTIN^G 35 

merely have more natural, more familiar associations. 
But compare one of his compositions with those of 
the little Dutch and Flemish masters, for truth, feel- 
ing, nature handled after her own suggestions, in- 
stead of within hmits and on lines imposed upon her 
from without. By the side of Van Ostade or Brauer, 
for example, one of Greuze's bits of humble life 
seems like an academic composition, quite out of 
touch with its subject, and, except for its art, abso- 
lutely lifeless and insipid. 

In a word, his choice of subjects, of genre, is really 
no disguise at all of his essential classicality. Both 
ideally and technically, in the way he conceives and 
the way he handles his subject, he is only superfici- 
ally romantic or real. His literature, so to speak, is 
as conventional as his composition. One may com- 
pare him to Hogarth, though both as a moralist and 
a technician a longo intervaUo, of course. He is as- 
suredly not to be depreciated. His scheme of color 
is clear if not rich, his handling is frank if not unc- 
tuous or subtly interesting, his composition is care- 
ful and clever, and some of his heads are admirably 
painted — painted with a genuine feeling for quality. 
But his merits as well as his failings are decidedly 
academic, and as a romanticist he is really masquer- 
ading. He is much nearer to Fragonard than he is 
to Edouard Frere even. 

Chardin, on the other hand, is the one distin- 



36 FRENCH ART 

guished exception to the general character of French 
art in the artificial and intellectual eighteenth cen- 
tury. He is as natural as a Dutchman, and as modern 
as VoUon. As you walk through the French galleries 
of the Louvre, of all the canvases antedatiug our 
own era his are those toward which one feels the 
most sympathetic attraction, I think. You note at 
once his individuality, his independence of schools 
and traditions, his personal point of view, his preoc- 
cupation with the object as he perceives it. Noth- 
ing is more noteworthy in the history of French 
art, in the current of which the subordination of the 
individual genius to the general consensus is so 
much the rule, than the occasional exception — now 
of a single man, now of a group of men, destined to 
become in its turn a school — the occasional accent 
or interruption of the smooth course of slow devel- 
opment on the lines of academic precedent. Tyran- 
nical as academic precedent is (and nowhere has it 
been more tyrannical than in French painting) the 
general interest in aesthetic subjects which a general 
subscription to academic precedent implies is cer- 
tainly to be credited with the force and genuineness 
of the occasional protestant against the very system 
that has been powerful enough to popularize in- 
definitely the subject both of subscription and of re- 
volt. Without some such systematic propagandism 
of the aesthetic cultus as from the first the French In- 



CLASSIC PAINTING 37 

stitute has been characterized by, it is very doubtful 
if, in the complexity of modern society, the interest 
in sBsthetics can ever be made wide enough, uni- 
versal enough, to spread beyond those immediately 
and professionally concerned with it. The immense 
impetus given to this interest by a central organ of 
authority, that dignifies the subject with vrhich it 
occupies itself and draws attention to its value and 
its importance, has, a priori, the manifest effect of 
leading persons to occupy themselves with it, also, 
who otherwise would never have had their attention 
drawn to it. It would scarcely be an exaggeration 
to say, in other words, that but for the Institute 
there would not be a tithe of the number of names 
now on the roU of French artists. When art is in 
the air — and nothing so much as an academy pro- 
duces this condition — the chances of the production 
of even an unacademic artist are immensely in- 
creased. 

So in the midst of the Mignardise of Louis Quinze 
painting it is only superficially surprising to find a 
painter of the original force and flavor of Chardin. 
His wholesome and yet subtle variations from the 
art a la mode of his epoch might have been painted 
in the Holland of his day, or in our day anywhere 
that art so good as Chardin's can be produced, 
so far as subject and moral and technical attitude 
are concerned. They are, in quite accentuated con- 



38 FRENCH ART 

tra-distinction from the works of Greuze, thoroughly 
in the spirit of simplicity and directness. One notes 
in them at once that moral simplicity which predis- 
poses everyone to sympathetic appreciation. The 
special ideas of his time seem to pass him by un- 
moved. He has no community of interest with them. 
While he was painting his still life and domestic 
genre, the whole fantastic whirl of Louis Quinze 
society, with its aesthetic standards and accomplish- 
ments — accomplishments and standards that im- 
posed themselves everywhere else — was in agitated 
movement around him without in the least affecting 
his serene tranquillity, his almost sturdy composure. 
There can rarely have been such an instance as he 
affords of an artist's selecting from his environment 
just those things his own genius needed, and rejecting 
just what would have hampered or distracted him. 
He is as sane, as unsentimental, as truthful and un- 
pretending as the most literal and unimaginative 
Dutchman of his time or before it ; but he has also 
that feeling for style, and that instinct for avoiding 
the common and unclean which always seem to pre- 
vent French painters from " sinking with their sub- 
ject," as Dutch painters have been said to do. He 
seems never to let himself go either in the direction 
of Greuze's literary and sentimental manipulation of 
his homely material, or in the direction of supine 
satisfaction with this material, unrelieved and un* 



CLASSIC PAINTII^G 39 

elevated by an individual point of view, illustrated 
by the Brauers and Steens and Ostades. One per- 
ceives that what he cared for was really art itself, 
for the aesthetic aspect and significance of the life 
he painted. Affectionate as his interest in it evi- 
dently was, he as evidently thought of its artistic 
potentiahties, its capability of being treated with re- 
finement and delicacy, and of being made to serve 
the ends of beauty equally well with the conven- 
tionally beautiful material of his fan-painting con- 
temporaries. He looked at the world very originally 
through and over those round, horn-bowed spec- 
tacles of his, with a very shrewd and very kindly 
and sympathetic glance, too ; quite untinctured with 
prejudice or even predisposition. One can read his 
artistic isolation in his countenance with a very little 
exercise of fancy. 

VI 

It is the fashion to think of David as the painter 
of the Eevolution and the Empire. Eeally he is 
Louis Seize. Historical critics say that he had no 
fewer than four styles, but apart from obvious 
labels they would be puzzled to tell to which of 
these styles any individual picture of his belongs. 
He was from the beginning extremelj^, perhaps ab- 
surdly, enamoured of the antique, and we usually 
associate addiction to the antique with the Revolu- 



40 FRENCH ART 

tionary period. But perhaps politics are slower 
than the aesthetic movement ; David's view of art 
and practice of painting were fixed unalterably 
under the reign of philosophism. Philosophism, 
as Carlyle calls it, is the ruling spirit of his work. 
Long before the Eevolution — in 1774 — he painted 
what is still his most characteristic picture — " The 
Oath of the Horatii." His art developed and grew 
systematized under the Republic and the Empire ; 
but Napoleon, whose genius crystallized the ele- 
ments of everything in all fields of intellectual ef- 
fort with which he occupied himself, did little but 
formally "consecrate," in French phrase, the art of 
the painter of " The Oath of the Horatii " and the 
originator and designer of the " Fete " of Robes- 
pierre's "Etre Supreme." Spite of David's sub- 
serviency and that of others, he left painting very 
much where he found it. And he found it in a 
state of reaction against the Louis Quinze stand- 
ards. The break with these, and with everything 
regence, came with Louis Seize, Chardin being a 
notable exception and standing quite apart from 
the general drift of the French aesthetic movement ; 
and Greuze being only a pseudo-romanticist, and 
his work a variant of, rather than reactionary from, 
the artificiality of his day. Before painting could 
"return to nature," before the idea and inspiration 
of true romanticism could be born, a reaction in the 



CLASSIC PAINTING 41 

direction of severity after the artificial yet irre- 
sponsible riot of the Louis Quinze painters was 
naturally and logically inevitable. Painting was 
modified in the same measure with every other ex- 
pression in the general recueillement that followed 
the extravagance in all social and intellectual fields 
of the Louis Quinze epoch. But in becoming more 
chaste it did not become less classical. Indeed, so 
far as severity is a trait of classicality — and it is 
only an associated not an essential trait of it — paint- 
ing became more classical. It threw off its extra- 
vagances without swerving from the artificial char- 
acter of its inspiration. Art in general seemed con- 
tent with substituting the straight line for the 
curve — a change from Louis Quinze to Louis Seize 
that is very familiar even to persons who note the 
transitions between the two epochs only in the 
respective furniture of each ; a Louis Quinze chair 
or mirror, for example, having a flowing outline, 
whereas a Louis Seize equivalent is more rigid and 
rectilinear. 

David is artificial, it is to be pointed out, only in 
his ensemble. In detail he is real enough. And he 
always has an ensemble. His compositions, as com- 
positions, are admirable. They make a total im- 
pression, and with a vigor and vividness that belong 
to few constructed pictures. The canvas is always 
penetrated with David — illustrates as a whole, and 



42 FRENCH ART 

with completeness and comparative flawlessness, 
his point of view, his conception of the subject 
This, of course, is the academic point of view, the 
academic conception. But, as I say, his detail is 
surprisingly truthful and studied. His picture — 
which is always nevertheless a picture — is as incon- 
ceivable, as traditional in its inspiration, as facti- 
tious as you like ; his figures are always sapiently 
and often happily exact. His portraits are abso- 
lutely vital characterizations. And in general his 
sculptural sense, his self-control, his perfect power 
of expressing what he deemed worth expressing, 
are really what are noteworthy in his pictures, 
far more than their monotonous coloration and the 
coldness and unreality of the pictures themselves, 
considered as moving, real, or significant compo- 
sitions. In admiration of these it is impossible 
for us nowadays to go as far as even the roman- 
ticist, though extremely catholic, Gautier. They 
leave us cold. We have a wholly different ideal, 
which in order to interest us powerfully painting 
must illustrate — an ideal of more pertinence and 
appositeness to our own moods and manner of 
thought and feeling. 

Ingres, a painter of considerably less force, I 
think, comes much nearer to doing this. He is 
more elastic, less devoted to system. Without be- 
ing as free, as sensitive to impressions as we like 



CLASSIC PAINTING 43 

to see an artist of his powers, he escapes pedantry. 
His subject is not "The Eape of the Sabines," but 
"The Apotheosis of Homer," academic but not 
academically fatuitous. To follow the inspiration 
of the Vatican Stanze in the selection and treatment 
of ideal subjects is to be far more closely in touch 
with contemporary feehng as to what is legitimate 
and proper in imaginative painting, than to pic- 
torialize an actual event with a systematic artifici- 
ality and conformity to abstractions that would 
surely have made the sculptor of the Trajan column 
smile. Yet I would rather have " The Eape of the 
Sabines" within visiting distance than "The Apo- 
theosis of Homer." It is better, at least solider, 
painting. The painter, however dominated by his 
theory, is more the master of its illustration than 
Ingres is of the justification of his admiration for 
Eaphael. The "Homer" attempts more, but it is 
naturally not as successful in getting as effective a 
unity out of its greater complexity. It is in his less 
ambitious pictures that the genius of Ingres is un- 
mistakably evident — his heads, his single figures, 
his exquisite drawings almost in outline. His 
" Odalisque " of the Louvre is not as forceful as 
David's portrait of Madame Eecamier, but it is a 
finer thing. I should like the two to have changed 
subjects in this instance. His " Source " is beauti- 
fully drawn and modelled. In everything he did 



44 FEENCH ART 

distinction is apparent. Inferior assuredly to David 
when tie attempted the grand style, he had a truer 
feeling for the subtler qualities of style itself. All 
his works are linearly beautiful demonstrations of 
his sincerity — his sanity indeed — in proclaiming 
that drawing is "the probity of art." 

With a few contemporary painters and critics, 
whose specific penetration is sometimes in curious 
contrast with their imperfect catholicity, he has re- 
cently come into vogue again, after having been 
greatly neglected since the romantic outburst. 
But he belongs completely to the classic epoch. 
Neither he nor his refined and sympathetic pupil, 
Flandrin, did aught to pave the way for the modern 
movement. Intimations of the shifting point of 
view are discoverable rather in a painter of far 
deeper poetic interest than either, spite of Ingres's 
refinement and Flandrin's elevation — in Prudhon. 
Prudhon is the link between the last days of the 
classic supremacy and the rise of romanticism. 
Like Claude, like Chardin, he stands somewhat 
apart ; but he has distinctly the romantic inspira- 
tion, constrained and regularized by classic prin- 
ciples of taste. He is the French Correggio in far 
more precise parallelism than Lesueuris the French 
Kaphael. "With a grace and lambent color all his 
own — a beautiful mother-of-pearl and opalescent 
tone underlying his exquisite violets and graver 



CLASSIC PAIIS^TING 45 

hues ; a color- scheme, on the one hand, and a sense 
of design in hne and mass more suave and graceful 
than anything since the great Italians, on the other 
— he recalls the lovely chiaro - oscuro of the exqui- 
site Parmesan as it is recalled in no other modern 
painter. Occupying, as incontestably he does, his 
own niche in the pantheon of painters, he neverthe- 
less illustrates most distinctly and unmistakably the 
slipping away of French painting from classic 
formulas as well as from classic extravagance, and 
the tendency to new ideals of wider reach and 
greater tolerance — of more freedom, spontaneity, 
interest in "life and the world" — of a definitive 
break with the contracting and constricting forces 
of classicism. During its next period, and indeed 
down to the present day, French painting will 
preserve the essence of its classic traditions, vari- 
ously modified from decade to decade, but never 
losing the quality in virtue of which what is French 
is always measurably the most classic thing going ; 
but of this next period certainly Prudhon is the 
precursor, who, with all his classic serenity, pre- 
sages its passion for " storms, clouds, effusion, and 
rehef." 



II 

EOMANTIC PAINTING 



ROMANTIC PAINTING 



When we come to Scott after Fielding, says 
Mr. Stevenson, "we become suddenly conscious 
of the background." The remark contains an ad- 
mirable characterization of romanticism ; as distin- 
guished from classicism, romanticism is conscious- 
ness of the background. With Gros, Gericault, Paul 
Huet, Michel, Delacroix, French painting ceased to 
be abstract and impersonal. Instead of continuing 
the classic detachment, it became interested, curious, 
and catholic. It broadened its range immensely, 
and created its effect by observing the relations of 
its objects to their environment, of its figures to the 
landscape, of its subjects to their suggestions even 
in other spheres of thought ; Delacroix, Marilhat, 
Decamps, Fromentin, in painting the aspect of 
Orientalism, suggested, one may almost say, its 
sociology. For the abstractions of classicism, its 
formula, its fastidious system of arriving at perfec- 
tion by exclusions and sacrifices, it substituted an 
enthusiasm for the concrete and the actual ; it rev- 



50 FRE]!^CH ART 

elled in natural phenomena. Gautier was never 
more definitely the exponent of romanticism than 
in saying " I am a man for whom the visible world 
exists." To lines and curves and masses and their 
relations in composition, succeeds as material for 
inspiration and reproduction the varied spectacle of 
the external world. With the early romanticists it 
may be said that for the first time the external world 
"swims into" the painter's "ken." But, above all, 
in them the element of personality first appears in 
French painting with anything like general accept- 
ance and as the characteristic of a group, a school, 
rather than as an isolated exception here and there, 
such as Claude or Cbardin. The " point of view " 
takes the place of conformity to a standard. The 
painter expresses himself instead of endeavoring to 
realize an extraneous and impersonal ideal. What 
he himself personally thinks, how he himself per- 
sonally feels, is what we read in his works. 

It is true that, rightly understood, the romantic 
epoch is a period of evolution, and orderly evolution 
at that, if we look below the surface, rather than of 
systematic defiance and revolt. It is true that it 
recast rather than repudiated its inheritance of 
tradition. Nevertheless there has never been a time 
when the individual felt himseK so free, when every 
man of any original genius felt so keenly the exhil- 
aration of independence, when the " schools " of 



EOMAl^TIC PAINTING 51 

painting exercised less tyranny and, indeed, counted 
for so little. If it be exact to speak of the " roman- 
tic school " at all, it should be borne in mind that its 
adherents were men of the most marked and diverse 
individualities ever grouped under one standard. 
The impressionists, perhaps, apart, individuality is 
often spoken of as the essential characteristic of 
the painters of the present day. But beside the 
outburst of individuality at the beginning of the 
romantic epoch, much of the painting of the present 
day seems both monotonous and eccentric — the 
variation of its essential monotony, that is to say, 
being somewhat labored and express in comparison 
with the spontaneous multifariousness of the epoch 
of Delacroix and Decamps. In the decade between 
1820 and 1830, at all events, notwithstanding the 
strength of the academic tradition, painting was 
free from the thraldom of system, and the imagina- 
tion of its practitioners was not challenged and 
circumscribed by the criticism that is based upon 
science. Not only in the painter's freedom in his 
choice of subject, but in his way of treating it, in 
the way in which he " takes it," is the revolution — 
or, as I should be inclined to say, rather, the evolu- 
tion — shown. And as what we mean by personality 
is, in general, made up far more of emotion than of 
mind — there being room for infinitely more variety 
in feeling than in mental processes among intelli- 



62 FRENCH ART 

gent agents — it is natural to find the French roman- 
tic painters giving, by contrast with their predeces- 
sors, such free swing to personal feehng that we 
may almost sum up the origin of the romantic 
movement in French painting in saying that it was 
an ebullition of emancipated emotion. And, to go 
a step farther, we may say that, as nothing is so 
essential to poetry as feehng, we meet now for the 
first time with the poetic element as an inspiring 
motive and controlling force. 

The romantic painters were, however, by no 
means merely emotional. They were mainly im- 
aginative. And in painting, as in hterature, the 
great change wrought by romanticism consisted in 
stimulating the imagination instead of merely satis- 
fying the sense and the intellect. The main idea 
ceased to be as obviously accentuated, and its 
natural surroundings were given their natural 
place ; there was less direct statement and more 
suggestion ; the artist's effort was expended rather 
upon perfecting the ensemble, noting relations, tak- 
ing in a larger circle ; a suggested complexity of 
moral elements took the place of the old simpHcity, 
whose multifariousDess was almost wholly pictorial. 
Instead of a landscape as a tapestry background to 
a Holy Family, and having no pertinence but an 
artistic one, we have Corot's " Orpheus." 



ROMANTIC PAINTING 63 



Geeicault and Delacroix are the great names in- 
scribed at the head of the romantic roll. They will 
remain there. And the distinction is theirs not as 
awarded by the historical estimate ; it is personal. 
In the case of Gericault perhaps one thinks a little 
of " the man and the moment " theory. He was, 
it is true, the first romantic painter — at any rate 
the first notable romantic painter. His struggles, 
his steadfastness, his success — pathetically posthu- 
mous — have given him an honorable eminence. His 
example of force and freedom exerted an influence 
that has been traced not only in the work of De- 
lacroix, his immediate inheritor, but in that of the 
sculptor Kude, and even as far as that of Millet — to 
all outward appearance so different in inspiration 
from that of his own tumultuous and dramatic 
genius. And as of late years we look on the stages 
of any evolution as less dependent on individuals 
than we used to, doubtless just as Luther was con- 
firmed and supported on his way to the Council at 
Worms by the people calling on him from the 
house-tops not to deny the truth, Gericault was sus- 
tained and stimulated in the face of official obloquy 
by a more or less considerable aesthetic movement 
of which he was really but the leader and exponent. 



54 FRENCH ART 

But his fame is not dependent upon his revolt 
against the Institute, his influence upon his succes- 
sors, or his incarnation of an aesthetic movement. 
It rests on his individual accomplishment, his per- 
sonal value, the abiding interest of his pictures. 
" The Raft of the Medusa " will remain an admir- 
able and moving creation, a masterpiece of dramatic 
vigor and vivid characterization, of wide and deep 
human interest and truly panoramic grandeur, long 
after its contemporary interest and historic impor- 
tance have ceased to be thought of except by the 
aesthetic antiquarian. " The Wounded Cuirassier " 
and the ''Chasseur of the Guard" are not docu- 
ments of aesthetic history, but noble expressions of 
artistic sapience and personal feeling. 

What, I think, is the notable thing about both 
Gericault and Delacroix, however, as exponents, as 
the initiators, of romanticism, is the way in which 
they restrained the impetuous temperament they 
share within the confines of a truly classic reserve. 
Closely considered, they are not the revolutionists 
they seemed to the official classicism of their 
day. Not only do they not base their true claims 
to enduring fame upon a spirit of revolt against 
official and academic art — a spirit essentially nega- 
tive and nugatory, and never the inspiration of any- 
thing permanently puissant and attractive — but, 
compared with their successors of the present day, 



EOMANTIC PAINTING 55 

in whose works individual preference and predilec- 
tion seem to have a swing whose very freedom and 
irresponsible audacity extort admiration — compared 
with the confident temerariousness of what is known 
as modernite, their self-possession and sobriety seem 
their most noteworthy characteristics. Compared 
with the "Bar at the Folies-Bergere," either the 
" Raft of the Medusa " or the " Convulsionists of 
Tangiers " is a classic production. And the differ- 
ence is not at all due to the forty years' accretion 
of Protestantism which Manet represents as com- 
pared with the early romanticists. It is due to a 
complete difference in attitude. Gericault imbued 
himself with the inspiration of the Louvre. Dela- 
croix is said always to have made a sketch from the 
old masters or the antique a preliminary to his own 
daily work. So far from flaunting tradition, they 
may be said to have, in their own view, restored it ; 
so far from posing as apostles of innovation, they 
may almost be accused of " harking back " — of 
steeping themselves in what to them seemed best 
and finest and most authoritative in art, instead of 
giving a free rein to their own unregulated emo- 
tions and conceptions. 

Gericault died early and left but a meagre prod- 
uct. Delacroix is par excellence the representative 
of the romantic epoch. And both by the mass and 
the quality of his work he forms a true connecting 



56 FRENCH AET 

link between the classic epoch and the modern -^ 
in somewhat the same way as Prudhon does, though 
more explicitly and on the other side of the line of 
division. He represents culture — he knows art as 
well as he loves nature. He has a feeling for what 
is beautiful as well as a knowledge of what is true. 
He is pre-eminently and primarily a colorist — he is, 
in fact, the introducer of color as a distinct element 
in French painting after the pale and bleak reaction 
from the Louis Quinze decora tiveness. His color, 
too, is not merely the prismatic coloration of what 
had theretofore been mere chiaro-oscuro ; it is origi- 
nal and personal to such a degree that it has never 
been successfully imitated since his day. Withal, 
it is apparently simplicity itself. Its hues are ap- 
parently the primary ones, in the main. It depends 
upon no subtleties and refinements of tints for its 
effectiveness. It is significant that the absorbed 
and affected Rossetti did not like it ; it is too frank 
and clear and open, and shows too little evidence of 
the morbid brooding and hysterical forcing of an 
arbitrary and esoteric note dear to the English pre- 
Baphaelites. It attests a delight in color, not a 
fondness for certain colors, hues, tints — a difference 
perfectly appreciable to either an unsophisticated or 
an educated sense. It has a solidity and strength 
of range and vibration combined with a subtle 
sensitiveness, and, as a result of the fusion of the 



EOMAi^Tic painti:n-g 57 

two, a certain splendor that recalls Saracenic dec- 
oration. And witli this mastery of color is united 
a combined fii-mness and expressiveness of design 
that makes Delacroix unique by emphasizing his 
truly classic subordination of informing enthusiasm 
to a severe and clearly perceived ideal — an ideal in 
a sense exterior to his purely personal expression. 
In a word, his chief characteristic — and it is a 
supremely significant trait in the representative 
painter of romanticism — is a poetic imagination 
tempered and trained by culture and refinement. 
When his audacities and enthusiasms are thought of, 
the directions in his will for his tomb should be re- 
membered too : " n n'y sera place ni embleme, ni 
buste, ni statue ; mon tombeau sera copie tres ex- 
actement sur I'antique, ou Yignoles ou Palladio, 
avec des saillies tres prononcees, contrairement a 
tout ce qui se fait aujourd'hui en architecture." 
"Let there be neither emblem, bust, nor statue 
on my tomb, which shall be copied very scrupu- 
lously after the antique, either Yignola or Palladio, 
with prominent projections, contrary to everything 
done to-day in architecture." In a sense all Dela« 
croix is in these words. 



58 FRENCH ART 



m 

Delacroix's color deepens into an almost musical 
intensity occasionally in Decamps, whose oriental 
landscapes and figures, far less important intellect- 
ually, far less maglstrales in conception, have at 
times, one may say perhaps without being too fan- 
ciful, a truly symphonic quality that renders them 
unique. " The Suicide " is like a chord on a violin. 
But it is when we come to speak of the "Fontaine- 
bleau Group," in especial, I think, that the aesthetic 
susceptibility characteristic of the latter half of the 
nineteenth century feels, to boiTow M. Taine's intro- 
duction to his lectures on " The Ideal in Art," that 
the subject is one only to be treated in poetry. 

Of the noblest of all so-called " schools," Millet is 
perhaps the most popular member. His popular- 
ity is in great part, certainly, due to his literary 
side, to the sentiment which pervades, which 
drenches, one may say, all his later work — his work 
after he had, on overhearing himself characterized 
as a painter of naked women, betaken himself to his 
true subject, the French peasant. A literary, and a 
very powerful literary side, Millet undoubtedly has ; 
and instead of being a weakness in him it is a power. 
His sentimental appeal is far from being surplusage, 
but, as is not I think popularly appreciated, it is 



EOMANTIC PAINTINa 59 

subordinate, and tlie fact of its subordination gives 
it what potency it lias. It is idle to deny this po- 
tency, for his portrayal of the French peasant in his 
varied aspects has probably been as efficient a char- 
acterization as that of George Sand herself. But, 
if a moral instead of an aesthetic effect had been 
Millet's chief intention, we may be sure that it 
would have been made far less incisively than it has 
been. Compare, for example, his peasant pictures 
with those of the almost purely literary painter 
Jules Breton, who has evidently chosen his field 
for its sentimental rather than its pictorial value, 
and whose work is, perhaps accordingly, by contrast 
with Millet's, noticeably external and superficial 
even on the literary side. When Millet ceased to 
deal in the Correggio manner with Correggiesque 
subjects, and devoted himself to the material that 
was really native to him, to his own peasant gen- 
ius — whatever he may have thought about it him- 
self, he did so because he could treat this material 
pictorially with more freedom and less artificiality, 
with more zest and enthusiasm, with a deeper 
sympathy and a more intimate knowledge of its 
artistic characteristics, its pictorial potentialities. 
He is, I think, as a painter, a shade too much 
preoccupied with this material, he is a little too 
philosophical in regard to it, his pathetic struggle 
for existence exaggerated his sentimental affiliations 



60 FEENCH ART 

with it somewhat, he made it too exclusively his 
subject, perhaps. We gain, it may be, at his ex- 
pense. With his artistic gifts he might have been 
more fortunate, had his range been broader. But in 
the main it is his pictorial handling of this material, 
with which he was in such acute sympathy, that 
distinguishes his work, and that will preserve its 
fame long after its humanitarian and sentimental 
appeal has ceased to be as potent as it now is — 
at the same time that it has itself enforced this 
appeal in the subordinating manner I have sug- 
gested. When he was asked his intention, in his 
picture of a maimed calf borne away on a litter 
by two men, he said it was simpl}" to indicate 
the sense of weight in the muscular movement and 
attitude of the bearers' arms. 

His great distinction, in fine, is artistic. His early 
painting of conventional subjects is not without 
significance in its witness to the quaHty of his 
talent. Another may paint French peasants all his 
life and never make them permanently interesting, 
because he has not Millet's admirable instinct and 
equipment as a painter. He is a superb colorist, 
at times — always an enthusiastic one ; there is 
something almost unregulated in his delight in 
color, in his fondness for glowing and resplendent 
tone. No one gets farther away from the academic 
grayness, the colorless chiaro-oscuro of the conven- 



EOMANTIC PAINTING 61 

tional painters. He runs his key up and loads his 
canvas, occasionally, in what one may call not so 
much bai'baric as uncultivated and elementary fash- 
ion. He cares so much for color that sometimes, 
when his effect is intended to be purely atmos- 
pheric, as in the " Angelus," he misses its justness 
and fitness, and so, in insisting on color, obtains 
from the color point of view itself an infelicitous 
— a colored — result. Occasionally he bathes a 
scene in yellow mist that obscures all accentuations 
and play of values. But always his feeling for color 
betrays him a painter rather than a morahst. And 
in composition he is, I should say, even more dis- 
tinguished. His composition is almost always dis- 
tinctly elegant. Even in so simple a scheme as that 
of " The Sower," the lines are as fine as those of a 
Raphael. And the way in which balance is pre- 
served, masses are distributed, and an organic play 
of parts related to each other and each to the sum 
of them is secured, is in all of his large works so 
salient an element of their admirable excellence, 
that, to those who appreciate it, the dependence of 
his popularity upon the sentimental suggestion of 
the raw material with which he dealt seems almost 
grotesque. In his line and mass and the relations 
of these in composition, there is a severity, a re- 
straint, a conformity to tradition, however person- 
ally felt and individually modified, that evince a 



63 FRENCH ART 

strong classic strain in this most unacademic of 
painters. Millet was certainly an original genius, if 
there ever was one. In spite of, and in open hostili- 
ty to, the popular and conventional painting of his 
day, he followed his own bent and went his own way. 
Better, perhaps, than any other painter, he repre- 
sents absolute emancipation from the prescribed, 
from routine and formulary. But it would be a 
signal mistake to fail to see, in the most character- 
istic works of this most personal representative of 
romanticism, that subordination of the individual 
whim and isolated point of view to what is accepted, 
proven, and universal, which is essentially what we 
mean by the classic attitude. One may almost go 
so far as to say, considering its reserve, its restraint 
and poise, its sobriety and measure, its quiet and 
composure, its subordination of individual feeling 
to a high sense of artistic decorum, that, romantic 
as it is, unacademic as it is, its most incontestable 
claim to permanence is the truly classic spirit 
which, however modified, inspires and infiltrates it. 
Beside some of the later manifestations of individual 
genius in French painting, it is almost academic. 

In Corot, anyone, I suppose, can see this note, and 
it would be surplusage to insist upon it. He is the 
ideal classic-romantic painter, both in temperament 
and in practice. Millet's subject, not, I think, his 
treatment — possibly his wider range — makes him 



EOMATTTIC PAIlTTINa 63 

seem more deeply serious than Corot, but he is not 
essentially as nearly unique. He is unrivalled in 
his way, but Corot is unparalleled. Corot inherits 
the ti-adition of Claude ; his motive, like Claude's, 
is always an effect, and, like Claude's, his means are 
light and air. But his effect is a shade more impal- 
pable, and his means are at once simpler and more 
subtle. He gets farther away from the phenomena 
which are the elements of his ensemble, farther than 
Claude, farther than anyone. His touch is as light 
as the zephyr that stirs the diaphanous di-apery of 
his trees. Beside it Claude's has a suspicion, at 
least, of unctuousness. It has a pure, crisp, vibrant 
accent, quite without analogue in the technic of 
landscape painting. Taking technic in its widest 
sense, one may speak of Corot' s shortcomings — not, 
I think, of his failures. It would be difficult to 
mention a modern painter more uniformly success- 
ful in attaining his aim, in expressing what he wishes 
to express, in conveying his impression, communi- 
cating his sensations. 

That a painter of his power, a man of the very 
first rank, should have been content — even placidly 
content — to exercise it within a range by no means 
narrow, but plainly circumscribed, is certainly wit- 
ness of limitation. "Delacroix is an eagle, I am 
only a skylark," he remarked once, with his charac- 
teristic cheeriness. His range is not, it is true, as 



64 FEENCH ART 

circumscribed as is generally supposed outside of 
France. Outside of France his figure-painting, for 
example, is almost unknown. We see chiefly varia- 
tions of his green and gray arbored pastoral — now 
idyllic, now heroic, now full of freshness, the sky- 
lark quality, now of grave and deep harmonies and 
wild, sweet notes of transitory suggestion. Of his 
figures we only know those shifting shapes that 
blend in such classic and charming manner with the 
glades and groves of his landscapes. Of his " Hagar 
in the Wilderness," his "St. Jerome," his "Flight 
into Egypt," his " Democritus," his "Baptism of 
Christ," with its nine life-size figures, who, outside 
of France, has even heard ? How many foreigners 
know that he painted what are called architectural 
subjects delightfully, and even genre with zest ? 

But compared with his landscape, in which he is 
unique, it is plain that he excels nowhere else. The 
splendid display of his works in the Centenaire 
Exposition of the great World's Fair of 1889, was a 
revelation of his range of interest rather than of his 
range of power. It was impossible not to perceive 
that, surprising as were his essays in other fields to 
those who only knew him as a landscape painter, he 
was essentially and integrally a painter of landscape, 
though a painter of landscape who had taken his 
subject in a way and treated it in a manner so per- 
sonal as to be really unparalleled. Outside of land- 



EOMANTIC PAINTING 65 

scape bis interest was clearly not real. In his other 
works one notes a certain debonnaire irresponsibility. 
He pursued nothing seriously but out-of-doors, its 
vaporous atmosphere, its crisp twigs and graceful 
branches, its misty distances and piquant accents, 
what Thoreau calls its inaudible panting. His true 
theme, lightly as he took it, absorbed him ; and no 
one of any sensitiveness can ever regret it. His 
powers, following the indication of his true tem- 
perament, his most genuine inspiration, are con- 
centrated upon the very finest thing imaginable in 
landscape painting ; as, indeed, to produce as they 
have done the finest landscape in the history of art, 
they must have been. 

There are, however, two things worth noting in 
Corot's landscape, beyond the mere fact that, better 
even than Eousseau, he expresses the essence of 
landscape, dwells habitually among its inspirations, 
and is its master rather than its servant. One is 
the way in which he poetizes, so to speak, the sim- 
plest stretches of sward and clumps of trees, and 
long clear vistas across still ponds, with distances 
whose accents are pricked out with white houses 
and yellow cows and placid fishers and ferrymen 
in red caps, seen in ghmpses through curtains of 
sparse, feathery leafage — or peoples woodland open- 
ings with nymphs and fauns, silhouetted against the 
sunset glow, or dancing in the cool gray of dusk. 



66 FEElSrCH ART 

A man of no reading, having only the elements of 
an education in the general sense of the term, his 
instinctive sense for what is refined was so delicate 
that we may say of his landscapes that, had the 
Greeks left any they would have been like Corot's. 
And this classic and cultivated effect he secured not 
at all, or only very incidentally, through the force 
of association, by dotting his hillsides and vaporous 
distances with bits of classic architecture, or by 
summing up his feeling for the Dawn in a graceful 
figure of Orpheus greeting with extended gesture 
the growing daylight, but by a subtle interpenetra- 
tion of sensuousness and severity resulting in pre- 
cisely the sentiment fitly characterized by the epi- 
thet classic. The other trait peculiar to Corot's 
representation of nature and expression of himself 
is his .color. No painter ever exhibited, I think, 
quite such a sense of refinement in so narrow a 
gamut. Green and gray, of course, predominate 
and set the key, but he has an interestingly varied 
palette on the hither side of splendor whose subtle- 
ties are capable of giving exquisite pleasure. Never 
did anyone use tints with such positive force. Tints 
with Corot have the vigor and vibration of positive 
colors — his lilacs, violets, straw-colored hues, his al- 
most Quakerish coquetry with drabs and slates and 
pure clear browns, the freshness and bloom he im- 
parted to his tones, the sweet and shrinking wild 



ROMANTIC PAINTIKa 67 

flowers with which as a spray he sprinkled his 
humid dells and brook margins. But Corot's true 
distinction — what gives him his unique position at 
the very head of landscape art, is neither his color, 
delicate and interesting as his color is, nor his clas- 
sic serenity harmonizing with, instead of depending 
upon, the chance associations of architecture and 
mythology with which now and then he decorates his 
landscapes ; it is the blithe, the airy, the truly spir- 
itual way in which he gets farther away than any- 
one from both the actual pigment that is his in- 
strument, and from the phenomena that are the 
objects of his expression — his ethereality, in a word. 
He has communicated his sentiment almost without 
material, one may say, so ethereally independent of 
their actual analogues is the interest of his trees 
and sky and stretch of sward. This sentiment, thus 
mysteriously triumphant over color or form, or 
other sensuous charm, which nevertheless are only 
subtly subordinated, and by no manner of means 
treated lightly or inadequately, is as exalted as any 
that has in our day been expressed in any manner. 
Indeed, where, outside of the very highest poetry of 
the century, can one get the same sense of elation, 
of aspiring delight, of joy unmixed with regret — 
since " the splendor of truth " which Plato defined 
beauty to be, is more animating and consoling than 
the " weary weight of all this unintelligible world,'* 



68 FRENCH ART 

is depressing to a spirit of lofty seriousness and 
sanity ? 

Dupre and Diaz are the decorative painters of the 
Fontainebleau group. They are, of modern paint- 
ers, perhaps the nearest in spirit to the old masters, 
pictorially speaking. They are rarely in the grand 
style, though sometimes Dupre is restrained enough 
to emulate if not to achieve its sobriety. But they 
have the hel air, and belong to the aristocracy of the 
painting world. Diaz, especially, has almost invari- 
ably the patrician touch. It lacks the exquisiteness 
of Monticelli's, in which there is that curiously ele- 
vated detachment from the material and the real 
that the Italians — and the Proven9al painter's in- 
spiration and method, as well as his name and line- 
age, suggest an Italian rather than a French associ- 
ation — exhibit far oftener than the French. But 
Diaz has a larger sweep, a saner method. He is 
never eccentric, and he has a dignity that is Iberian, 
though he is French rather than Spanish on his 
aesthetic side, and at times is as conservative as 
Rousseau — without, however, reaching Rousseau's 
lofty simplicity except in an occasional happy 
stroke. Both he and Dupre are primarily colorists. 
Dupre sees nature through a prism. Diaz's groups 
of dames and gallants have a jewel-like aspect ; 
they leave the same impression as a tangle of rib- 



eoma:n-tic painting bd 

bons, a bunch of exotic flowers, a heap of gems flung 
together with the feUcity of haphazard. In general, 
and when they are in most completely characteristic 
mood, it is not the sentiment of nature that one 
gets from the work of either painter. It is not even 
their sentiment of nature — the emotion aroused in 
their susceptibilities by natural phenomena. What 
one gets is theii* personal feeling for color and de- 
sign — their decorative quality, in a word. 

The decorative painter is he to whom what is 
called " subject," even in its least restricted sense 
and with its least substantial suggestions, is com- 
paratively indifferent. Nature supplies him with 
objects ; she is not in any intimate degree his sub- 
ject. She is the medium through which, rather 
than the material of which, he creates his effects. 
It is her potentialities of color and design that he 
seeks, or at any rate, of all her infinitely numerous 
traits, it is her hues and arabesques that strike him 
most forcibly. He is incurious as to her secrets 
and calls upon her aid to interpret his own, but he 
is so independent of her, if he be a decorative 
painter of the first rank — a Diaz or a Dupre — that 
his rendering of her, his picture, would have an 
agreeable effect, owing to its design or color or 
both, if it were turned upside down. Decorative 
painting in this sense may easily be carried so far 
as to seem incongruous and inept, in spite of its 



70 FRENCH ART 

superficial attractiveness. The peril that threatens 
it is whim and freak. Some of Monticelli's, some 
of Matthew Maris's pictures, illustrate the exagger- 
ation of the decorative impulse. After all, a painter 
must get his effect, whatever it be and however it 
may shun the literal and the exact, by rendering 
things with pigments. And some of the decorative 
painters only escape things by obtruding pigments, 
just as the trompe-Vodl or optical illusion painters 
get away from pigments by obtruding things. It 
is the distinction of Diaz and Dupre that they avoid 
this danger in most triumphant fashion. On the 
contrary, they help one to see the decorative ele- 
ment in nature, in " things," to a degree hardly 
attained elsewhere since the days of the great Vene- 
tians. Their predilection for the decorative ele- 
ment is held in leash by the classic tradition, with 
its reserve, its measure, its inculcation of sobriety 
and its sense of security. Dupre paints Seine sun- 
sets and the edge of the forest at Fontainebleau, its 
" long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight," in a 
way that conveys the golden glow, the silvery gleam, 
the suave outline of spreading leafage, and the mas- 
sive density of mysterious boscage with the force 
of an almost abstract acuteness. Does nature look 
like this? Who knows? But in this semblance, 
surely, she appeared to Dupre's imagination. And 
doubtless Diaz saw the mother-of-pearl tints in the 



EOMANTIC PAINTING 71 

complexion of his models, and is not to be accused 
of artificiality, but to be credited with a true sin- 
cerity of selection in juxtaposing his soft corals and 
carnations and gleaming topaz, amethyst, and sap- 
phire hues. The most exacting literalist can hardly 
accuse them of solecism in their rendering of nat- 
ure, true as it is that their decorative sense is so 
strong as to lead them to impose on nature their 
own sentiment instead of yielding themselves to ab- 
sorption in hers, and thus, in harmonious and sym- 
pathetic concert with her, like Claude and Corot, 
Eousseau and Daubigny, interpreting her subtle 
and supreme significance. 

Rousseau carried the fundamental principle of the 
school farther than the others — with him interest, 
delight in, enthusiasm for nature became absorp- 
tion in her. Whereas other men have loved nature, 
it has been acutely remarked, Eousseau was in love 
with her. It was felicitously of him, rather than of 
Dupre or Corot, that the naif peasant inquired, 
" Why do you paint the tree ; the tree is there, is it 
not ? " And never did nature more royally reward 
allegiance to her than in the sustenance and inspi- 
ration she furnished for Rousseau's genius. You 
feel the point of view in his picture, but it is ap- 
parently that of nature herself as well as his own. 
It is not the less personal for this. On the contrary, 



72 FEENCH ART 

it is extremely personal, and few pictures are as 
individual, as characteristic. Occasionally Diaz ap- 
proaches him, as I have said, but only in the very 
happiest and exceptional moments, when the dig- 
nity of nature as well as her charm seems specially 
to impress and impose itself upon the less serious 
painter. But Rousseau's selection seems instinctive 
and not sought out. He knows the secret of nature's 
pictorial element. He is at one with her, adopts 
her suggestions so cordially and works them out 
with such intimate sympathy and harmoniousness, 
that the two forces seem reciprocally to reinforce 
each other, and the result gains many fold in power 
from their subtle co-operation. His landscapes have 
in this way a Wordsworthian directness, simplicity, 
and severity. They are not troubled and dramatic 
like Turner's. They are not decorative like Dupre's, 
they have not the solemn sentiment of Daubigny's, 
or the airy aspiration and fairy-like blitheness of 
Corot's. But there is in them '' all breathing hu- 
man passion ; " and at times, as in " Le Givi-e," they 
rise to majesty and real grandeur because they are 
impregnated with the sentiment, as well as are rec- 
ords of the phenomena, of nature, and one may 
say of Rousseau, paraphrasing Mr. Arnold's remark 
about Wordsworth, that nature seems herself to take 
the brush out of his hand and to paint for him 
" with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power." 



KOMANTIC PAINTII^a 73 

Kousseau, however, is French, and in virtue of his 
nativity exhibits always what Wordsworth's treat- 
ment of nature exhibits only occasionally, namely, 
the Gallic gift of style. It is rarely as felicitous as 
in Corot, in every detail of whose every work, one 
may almost say, its informing, co-ordinating, elevat- 
ing influence is distinctly to be perceived ; but it is 
always present as a factor, as a force dignifying and 
relieving from all touch, all taint of the commonness 
that is so often inseparably associated with art 
whose absorption in nature is listlessly unthinking 
instead of enthusiastic and alert. In Eousseau, too, 
in a word, we have the classic strain, as at least a 
psychological element, and note as one source of 
his power his reserve and restraint, his perfect self- 
possession. 

In Daubigny a similar attitude toward nature is 
obvious, but with a sensible difference. Affection 
for, rather than absorption in her, is his inspiration. 
Daubigny stands somewhat apart from the Fontaine- 
bleau group, with whom nevertheless he is popularly 
and properly associated, for though he painted Nor- 
mandy mainly, he was spiritually of the Barbizon 
kindred. He stands, however, somewhat apart from 
French painting in general, I think. There is less 
style, more sentiment, more poetry in his landscapes 
than in those of his countrymen who are to be com- 
pared with him. Beyond what is admirable in them 



74 FRENCH AET 

there is something attaching as well. He drew and 
engraved a good deal, as well as painted. He did 
not concentrate his powers enough, perhaps, to 
make as signal and definite a mark as otherwise he 
might have done. He is a shade desultory, and too 
spontaneous to be systematic. One must be sys- 
tematic to reach the highest point, even in the least 
material spheres. But never have the grave and sol- 
emn aspects of landscape found a sweeter and se- 
rener spirit to interpret them. In some of his pict- 
ures there is a truly religious feeling. His frank- 
ness recalls Constable's, but it is more distinguished 
in being more spiritual. He has not Diaz's ele- 
gance, nor Corot's witchery, nor Rousseau's power, 
but nature is more mysteriously, more mystically 
significant to him, and sets a deeper chord vibrating 
within him. He is a sensitive instrument on which 
she plays, rather than a magician who wins her se- 
crets, or an observer whose generalizing imagination 
she sets in motion. The design of some of his im- 
portant works, notably that of his last Salon picture, 
is very distinguished, and in one of his large can- 
vases representing a road like that from Barbizon 
through the level plain to Chailly, there is the spirit 
and sentiment of all the summer evenings that ever 
were. But he has distinctly less power than the 
strict Fontainebleau group. He has, in force, less 
affinity with them than Troyon has, whose force is 



KOMAis-Tic painti:n^& 75 

often magnificent, and whose landscape is so sweet, 
often, and often so strong as well, that one wonders 
a little at his fondness for cattle — in spite of the 
way in which he justifies it by being the first of cat- 
tle painters. And neither Daubigny nor Troyon, 
nor, indeed, Eousseau himself, often reaches in 
dramatic grandeur the lofty landscape of Michel, 
who, with Paul Huet (the latter in a more strictly 
historical sense) were so truly the forerunners and 
initiators of the romantic landscape movement, both 
in sentiment and chronology, in spite of their Dutch 
tradition, as to make the common ascription of its 
debt to Constable, whose aid was so cordially wel- 
comed in the famous Salon of 1824, a little 
strained. 

IV 

But quite aside from the group of poetic paint- 
ers which stamped its impress so deeply upon the 
romantic movement at the outset, that to this day it 
is Delacroix and Millet, Decamps and Corot whom 
we think of when we think of the movement itself, 
the classic tradition was preserved all through the 
period of greatest stress and least conformity by 
painters of great distinction, who, working under 
the romantic inspiration and more or less according 
to what may be called romantic methods, neverthe- 



7t> FRENCH ART 

less possessed the classic temperament in tao emi- 
nent a degree that to us their work seems hardly 
less academic than that of the Revolution and the 
Empire. Not only Ingres, but Delaroche and Ary 
Scheffer, painted beside Gericault and Delacroix. 
Ary Scheffer was an eloquent partisan of romantic- 
ism, yet his "Dante and Beatrice" and his "Temp- 
tation of Christ " are admirable only from the aca- 
demic point of view. Delaroche's " Hemicycle " and 
his many historical tableaux are surely in the classic 
vein, however free they may seem in subject and 
treatment by contrast with the works of David and 
Ingres. They leave us equally cold, at all events, 
and in the same way — for the same reason. They 
betray the painter's preoccupation with art rather 
than with nature. They do, in truth, differ widely 
from the works which they succeeded, but the dif- 
ference is not temperamental. They suggest the 
French phrase, plus pa change, plus c'est la meme 
chose. Gerome, for example, feels the exhilaration 
of the free air of romanticism fanning his enthusi- 
asm. He does not confine himself, as, born a de- 
cade or two earlier, certainly he would have done, 
to classic subject. He follows Decamps and Maril- 
hat to the Orient, which he paints with the utmost 
freedom, so far as the choice of theme is concerned 
— descending even to the danse du ventre of a Turk- 
ish cafe. He paints historical pictures with a real- 



EOMANTic pai:n^ting 77 

ism unknown before his day. He is almost equally 
famous in the higher class of genre subjects. But 
throughout everything he does it is easy to perceive 
the academic point of view, the classic temperament. 
David assuredly would never have chosen one of 
Gerome's themes ; but had he chosen it, he would 
have treated it in much the same way. Allowance 
made for the difference in time, in general feeling 
of the aesthetic environment, the change in ideas as 
to what was fit subject for representation and fitting 
manner of treating the same subject, it is hardly an 
exaggeration to say that Ingres would have sincerely 
applauded Gerome's " Cleopatra " issuing from the 
carpet roll before Caesar. And if he failed to per- 
ceive the noble dramatic power in such a work as 
the " Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant," his failure 
would nowadays, at least among intelligent ama- 
teurs, be ascribed to an intolerance which it is one 
of the chief merits of the romantic movement to 
have adjudged absurd. 

It is a source of really aesthetic satisfaction to see 
everything that is attempted as well done as it is in 
the works of such painters as Bouguereau and Ca- 
brnel. Of course the feehng that denies them large 
importance is a legitimate one. The very excellence 
of their technic, its perfect adaptedness to the mo- 
tive it expresses, is, considering the insignificance 
of the motive, subject for criticism ; inevitably it 



78 FRENCH ART 

partakes of the futility of its subject-matter. Of 
course the i^ersonal value of the man, the mind, be- 
hind any plastic expression is, in a sense, the meas- 
ure of the expression itself. If it be a mind inter- 
ested in " pouncet-box " covers, in the pictorial 
setting forth of themes whose illustration most in- 
timately appeals to the less cultivated and more 
rudimentary appreciation of fine art — as indisput- 
ably the Madonnas and Charities and Oresteses and 
Bacchus Triumphs of M. Bouguereau do — one may 
very well dispense himself from the duty of admir- 
ing its productions. Life is short, and more im- 
portant things, things of more significant import, 
demand attention. The grounds on which the 
works of Bouguereau and Cabanel are admired are 
certainly insufficient. But they are experts in their 
sphere. What they do could hardly be better done. 
If they appeal to a bourgeois, a philistine ideal of 
beauty, of interest, they do it with a perfection that 
is pleasing in itself. No one else does it half so well. 
To minds to which they appeal at all, they appeal 
with the force of finahty ; for these they create 
as well as illustrate the type of what is admirable 
and lovely. It is as easy to account for their 
popularity as it is to perceive its transitory quality. 
But not only is it a mark of limitation to refuse all 
interest to such a work as, for example, M. Cabanel' s 
" Birth of Venus," in the painting of which a vast 



EOMATTTIC PAINTI]S"G 79 

deal of technical expertness is enjoyably evident, 
and which in every respect of motive and execution 
is far above similar things done elsewhere than in 
France ; it is a still greater error to confound such 
painters as M. Cabanel and M. Bouguereau with 
other painters whose classic temperament has been 
subjected to the universal romantic influence equally 
with theirs, but whose production is as different 
from theirs as is that of the thorough and pure ro- 
manticists, the truly poetic painters. 

The instinct of simplification is an intelligent and 
sound one. Its satisfaction is a necessary prelim- 
inary to efficient action of any kind, and indeed the 
basis of all fruitful philosophy. But in criticism 
this instinct can only be satisfied intelligently and 
soundly by a consideration of everything appealing 
to consideration, and not at all by heated and 
wiKul, or superior and supercilious, exclusions. 
Catholicity of appreciation is the secret of critical 
felicity., To follow the line of least resistance, not 
to take into account those elements of a problem, 
those characteristics of a subject, to which, superfi- 
cially and at first thought, one is insensitive, is to 
dispense one*s self from a great deal of particularly 
disagreeable industry, but the result is only transi- 
torily agreeable to the sincere intelligencOc It is 
in criticism, I think, though no doubt in criticism 
alone, preferable to lose one's self in a maze of per- 



80 FRENCH ART 

plexity — distressing as this is to the critic who ap- 
preciates the indispensability of clairvoyance in 
criticism — rather than to reach swiftly and simply a 
conclusion which candor would have foreseen as the 
inevitable and unjudicial result of following one's 
own likes and whims, and one's contentment with 
which must be alloyed with a haunting sense of in- 
security. In criticism it is perhaps better to keep 
balancing counter-considerations than to determine 
brutally by excluding a whole set of them because 
of the difficulty of assigning them their true weight. 
In this way, at least, one preserves the attitude of 
poise, and poise is perhaps the one essential element 
of criticism. In a word, that catholicity of sensi- 
tiveness which may be called mere impressionism, 
behind which there is no body of doctrine at all, is 
more truly critical than intolerant depreciation or 
unreflecting enthusiasm. " The main thing to do," 
says Mr. Arnold, in a significant passage, " is to get 
one's self out of the way and let humanity judge." 

It is temptingly simple to deny all importance to 
painters who are not poetic painters. And the 
temptation is especially seductive when the prosaic 
painters are paralleled by such a distinguished suc- 
cession of their truly poetic brethren as are the 
painters of the romantic epoch who are possessed 
of the classic temperament. But real criticism im- 
mediately suggests that prose has its place in paint- 



ROMANTIC PAINTING 81 

ing as in literature. In literature we do not insist 
even that the poets be poetic. Poetic is not the epi- 
thet that would be applied, for instance, to French 
classic verse or the English verse of the eighteenth 
century, compared with the poetry, French or Eng- 
lish, which we mean when we speak of poetry. Yet 
no one would think of denying the value of Dryden 
or even of Boileau. No one would even insist that, 
distinctly prosaic as are the qualities of Boileau — 
and I should say his was a crucial instance — he 
would have done better to abjure verse. And paint- 
ing, in a wide sense, is just as legitimately the ex- 
pression of ideas in form and color as literature is 
the expression of ideas in words. It is perfectly 
plain that Meissonier was not especially enamoured 
of beauty, as Corot, as Troyon, as Decamps was. 
But nothing could be less critical than to deny 
Meissonier's importance and the legitimate interest 
he has for every educated and intelligent person, in 
spite of his literalness and his insensitiveness to the 
element of beauty, and indeed to any truly pictorial 
significance whatever in the wide range of subjects 
that he essayed, with, in an honorable sense, such 
distinguished success. 

Especially in America, I think, where of recent 
years we have shown an Athenian sensitiveness to 
new impressions, the direct descendants of the clas- 
sic period of French painting have suffered from the 



82 FRENCH AET 

popularity of the Fontainebleau group. Their le- 
gitimate attachment to art, instead of the Fontaine- 
bleau absorption in nature, has given them a false 
reputation of artificiality. But the prose element 
in art has its justification as well as the poetic, and 
it is witness of a narrow culture to fail in appre- 
ciation of its admirable accomplishment. The 
academic wing of the French romantic painting is 
marked precisely by a breadth of culture that is 
itself a source of agreeable and elevated interest. 
The neo-Grec painters are thoroughly educated. 
They lack the picturesque and unexpected note of 
their poetic brethren — they lack the moving and in- 
terpreting, the elevating and exquisite touch of 
these ; nay, they lack the penetrating distinction 
that radiates even from rusticity itself when it is 
inspired and transfigured as it appears in such 
works as those of Millet and Eousseau. But their 
distinction is not less real for being the distinction 
of cultivation rather than altogether native and ab- 
solute. It is perhaps even more marked, more per- 
vasive, more directly associated with the painter's 
aim and effect. One feels that they are familiar with 
the philosophy of art, its history and practice, that 
they are articulate and eclectic, that for being less 
personal and powerful their horizon is less limited, 
their purely intellectual range, at all events, and 
in many cases their sesthetic interest, wider. They 



ROMAI^TIC PAINTING 83 

have more the cultivated man's bent for experimen- 
tation, for variety. They care more scrupulously 
for perfection, for form. With a far inferior sense 
of reality and far less felicity in dealing with it, 
their sapient skill in dealing with the abstractions 
of art is more salient. To be blind to their success- 
ful handling of line and mass and movement, is to 
neglect a source of refined pleasure. To lament 
their lack of poetry is to miss their admirable rhet- 
oric ; to regret their imperfect feeling for decora- 
tiveness is to miss their delightful decorum. 



As one has, however, so often occasion to note in 
France — where in every field of intellectual effort 
the influence of schools and groups and movements 
is so great that almost every individuality, no mat- 
ter how strenuous, falls naturally and intimately 
into association with some one of them — there is 
every now and then an exception that escapes these 
categories and stands quite by itself. In modern 
painting such exceptions, and widely different from 
each other as the poles, are Couture and Puvis de 
Chavannes. Better than in either the true roman- 
ticists with the classic strain, or the academic ro- 
manticists with the classic temperament, the blend- 
ing of the classic and romantic inspirations is 



84 FRENCH ART 

illustrated in Couture. The two are in him, in- 
deed, actually fused. In Puvis de Chavannes they 
appear in a wholly novel combination ; his classi- 
cism is absolutely unacademic, his romanticism un- 
real beyond the verge of mysticism, and so pre- 
occupied with visions that he may almost be called 
a man for whom the actual world does not exist 
— in the converse of Gautier's phrase. His distinc- 
tion is wholly personal. He lives evidently on an 
exceedingly high plane — dwells habitually in the 
delectable uplands of the intellect. The fact that 
his work is almost wholly decorative is not at all 
accidental. His talent, his genius if one chooses, 
requires large spaces, vast dimensions. There has 
been a great deal of rather profitless discussion as 
to whether he expressly imitates the primitifs or 
reproduces them sympathetically. But really he 
does neither ; he deals with theu' subjects occa- 
sionally, but always in a completely modern, as 
well as a thoroughly personal, way. His color is as 
original as his general treatment and composition. 
He had no schooling, in the ficole des Beaux Arts 
sense. A brief period in Henri Scheffer's studio, 
three months under Couture, after he had begun 
life in an altogether different field of effort, yielded 
him all the explicit instruction he ever had. His 
real study was done in Italy, in the presence of the 
old masters of Florence. With this equipment he 



EOMANTIC PAINTING 80 

revolutionized modern decoration, established, at 
any rate, a new convention for it. His convention 
is a little definite, a little bald. One may discuss it 
apart from bis own handling of it, even. It is a 
shade too express, too confident, too little careless 
both of tradition and of the typical qualities that 
secure permanence. In other hands one can easily 
imagine how insipid it might become. It has too 
little body, its scheme is too timorous, too vaporous 
to be handled by another. Puvis de Chavannes will 
probably have few successful imitators. But one 
must immediately add that if he does not found a 
school, his own work is, perhaps for that reason, at 
all events in spite of it, among the most important 
of the day. Quite unperturbed by current discus- 
sions, which are certainly of the noisiest by which 
the current of artistic development was ever de- 
flected, he has kept on his way, and has finally won 
all suffrages for an aesthetic expression that is real- 
ly antagonistic to the general aesthetic spirit of his 
time. 

Puvis de Chavannes is, perhaps, the most inter- 
esting figure in French painting to-day. Couture 
is little more than a name. It is curious to consider 
why. Twenty years ago he was still an important 
figure. He had been an unusually successful teach- 
er. Many American painters of distinction, espe° 
cially, were at one time his pupils — Hunt, La Farge^ 



86 FEENCH AKT 

George Butler. He theorized as much, as well — 
perhaps even better than — he painted. His "En- 
tretiens d'atelier " are as good in their way as his 
" Baptism of the Prince Imperial." He had a veiy 
distinguished talent, but he was too distinctly 
clever — clever to the point of sophistication. In 
this respect he was distinctly a man of the nine- 
teenth century. His great work, "Romains de la 
Decadence," created as fine an effect at the Cen- 
tenary Exhibition of the Paris World's Fair in 
1889 as it does in the Louvre, whence it was 
then transferred, but it was distinctly a decorative 
efifect — the effect of a fine panel in the general mass 
of color and design ; it made a fine centre. It re- 
mains his greatest performance, the performance 
upon which chiefly his fame will depend, though as 
painting it lacks the quality and breadth of "Le 
Fauconnier," perhaps the most interesting of his 
works to painters themselves, and of the " Day- 
Dreams" of the New York Metropolitan Museum 
of Art. Its permanent interest perhaps will be the 
historical one, due to the definiteness with which 
it assigns Couture his position in the evolution 
of French painting. It shows, as everything of 
Couture shows, the absence of any pictorial feel- 
ing so profound and personal as to make an im- 
pression strong enough to endure indefinitely. 
And it has not, on the other hand, the interest of 



EOMANTIC PAi:N"TI]S-a 87 

reality — that faithful and enthusiastic rendering of 
the external world which gives importance to and 
fixes the character of the French painting of the 
present day. 

Had Eegnault lived, he would have more ade- 
quately — or should I say more plausibly ? — marked 
the transition from romanticism to realism. Tem- 
peramentally he was clearly a thorough romanticist 
— far more so, for instance, than his friend Fortu- 
ny, whose intellectual reserve is always conspicuous. 
He essayed the most vehement kind of subjects, 
even in the classical field, where he treated them with 
truly romantic truculence. He was himself always, 
moreover, and ideally cared as little for nature as 
a fairy-story teller. In this sense he was more ro- 
mantic than the romanticists. His " Automedon," 
his portrait of General Prim, even his "Salome," are 
wilful in a degree that is either superb or super- 
ficial, as one looks at them ; but at any rate they are 
romantic a outrance. At the same time it was un- 
mistakably the aspect of things rather than theii* 
significance, rather than his view of them, that ap- 
pealed to him. He was farther away from the clas- 
sic inspiration than any other romanticist of his fel- 
lows ; and at the same time he cared for the external 
world more on its own account and less for its sug- 
gestions, than any painter of equal force before Cour- 
bet and Bastien-Lepage. The very fact that he was 



88 FRENCH ART 

not, intellectually speaking, wholly dans son assiette^ 
as the French say, shows that he was a genius of a 
transitional moment. One's final thought of him is 
that he died young, and one thinks so not so much 
because of the dramatic tragedy of his taking off 
by possibly the last Prussian bullet fired in the war 
of 1870-71, as because of the essentially experi- 
mental character of his painting. Undoubtedly he 
would have done great things. And undoubtedly 
they would have been different from those that he 
did; probably in the direction — already indicated 
in his most dignified performance — of giving more 
consistency, more vivid definiteness, more reality, 
even, to his already striking conceptions. 



Ill 

EEALISTIC PAINTING 



REALISTIC PAINTING 



To an intelligence fully and acutely alive, its own 
time must, I think, be more interesting than any 
other. The sentimental, the scholastic, the specu- 
lative temperament may look before or after with 
longing or regret ; but that sanity of mind which is 
practical and productive must find its most agree- 
able sensations in the data to which it is intimately 
and inexorably related. The light upon Greek 
literature and art for which we study Greek history, 
the light upon Koman history for which we study 
Latin literature and art, are admirable to us in very 
exact proportion as we study them for our ends. 
To every man and every nation that really breathes, 
true vitality of soul depends upon saying to one's 
self, with an emotion of equivalent intensity to the 
emotion of patriotism celebrated in Scott's familiar 
lines, This is my own, my native era and environ- 
ment. Culture is impossible apart from cosmopol- 
itanism, but self-respect is more indispensable even 
than culture. French art alone at the present time 



92 FEENCH AET 

possesses absolute self-respect. It possesses this 
quality in an eminent, in even an excessive degree ; 
but it possesses it, and in virtue of it is endued with 
a preservative quality that saves it from the empti- 
ness of imitation and the enervation of dilettantism. 
It has, in consequence, escaped that recrudescence 
of the primitive and inchoate known in England 
and among ourselves as pre-Raphaelitism. It has 
escaped also that almost abject worship of classic 
models which Winckelmann and Canova made uni- 
versal in Germany and Italy — not to speak of its 
echoes elsewhere. It has always stood on its own 
feet, and, however lacking in the higher qualities of 
imaginative initiative, on the one hand, and how- 
ever addicted to the academic and the traditional 
on the other, has always both respected its aesthe- 
tic heritage and contributed something of its own 
thereto. 

Why should not one feel the same quick interest, 
the same instinctive pride in his time as in his 
country? Is not sympathy with what is modei-n, 
instant, actual, and apposite a fair parallel of patri- 
otism? Neglect of other times in the "heir of all 
the ages " is analogous to chauvinism, and indicative 
of as ill-judged an attitude as that of provincial 
blindness to other contemporary points of view and 
systems of philosophy than one's own. Culture is 
equally hostile to both, and in art culture is as im- 



EEALISTIC PAINTING 93 

portant a factor as it is in less special fields of 
activity and endeavor. But in art, as elsewhere, 
culture is a means to an actual, present end, and 
the pre-Eaphaelite sentiment that dictates mere 
reproduction of what was once a genuine expression 
is as sterile as servile imitation of exotic modes of 
thought, dress, and demeanor is universally felt to 
be. The past — the antique, the renaissance, the clas- 
sic, and romantic ideals are to be used, not adopt- 
ed ; in the spirit of Goethe, at once the most orig- 
inal of modern men and the most saturated with 
cnlture, exhibited in his famous saying : " Noth- 
ing do I call my own which having inherited I have 
not reconquered for myself." 

It would indeed be a singular thing were the field 
of aesthetics the only one uninvaded by the scientific 
spirit of the time. The one force especially charac- 
teristic of our era is, I suppose, the scientific spirit. 
It is at any rate everywhere manifest, and it pos- 
sesses the best intellects of the century. A priori 
one may argue about its hostility, essential or other, 
to the artistic, the constructive spirit ; but to do so 
is at the most to beat the air, to waste one's breath, 
to Euskinize, in a word. Interest in life and the 
world, instead of speculation or self-expression, is 
the " note " of the day. The individual has with- 
ered terribly. He is supplanted by the type. Ma- 
terialism has its positive gospel ; it is not at all 



94 FRENCH ART 

tlie formulated expression of Goethe's "spirit that 
denies." Nature has acquired new dignity. She 
cannot be studied too closely, nor too long. The 
secret of the universe is now pursued through ob- 
servation, as formerly it was through fasting and 
prayer. Nothing is sacred nowadays because every- 
thing receives respect. If absolute beauty is now 
smiled at as a chimera, it is because beauty is per- 
ceived everywhere. Whatever is may not be right — 
the maxim has too much of an ex cathedra sound — 
but whatever is is interesting. Our attitude is at 
once humbler and more curious. The sense of the 
immensity, the immeasurableness of things, is more 
intimate and profound. What one may do is more 
modestly conceived ; what might be done, more 
justly appreciated. There is less confidence and 
more aspiration. The artist's eye is '^on the ob- 
ject " in more concentrated gaze than ever hereto- 
fore. If his sentiment, his poetry, is no longer "in- 
evitable," as Wordsworth complained Goethe's was 
not, it is more reverent, at any rate more circum- 
spect. If he is less exalted he is more receptive — 
he is more alive to impressions for being less of a 
philosopher. If he scouts authority, if even he 
accepts somewhat weakly the thraldom of dissent 
from traditional standards and canons, it is because 
he is convinced that the material with which he 
has to deal is superior to all canons and stand- 



EEALISTIC PAIl^TINa 95 

ards. If he esteems truth more than beauty, it is 
because what he thinks truth is more beautiful in 
his eyes than the stereotyped beauty he is adjured 
to attain. In any case, the distinction of the real- 
istic painters — like that of the realists in literature, 
where, also, it need not be said, France has been in 
the lead — is measurably to have got rid of solecisms ; 
to have made, indeed, obvious solecisms, and sole- 
cisms of conception as well as of execution, a little 
ridiculous. It is, to be sure, equally ridiculous to 
subject romantic productions to realistic standards, 
to blind one's self to the sentiment that saturates 
such romantic works as Scott's and Dumas's, or Ge- 
ricault's and Diaz's, and is wholly apposite to its 
own time and point of view. The great difficulty 
with a principle is that it is universal, and that when 
we deal with facts of any kind whatever, universality 
is an impossible ideal. Scott and Gericault are, 
nowadays, in what we have come to deem essentials, 
distinctly old-fashioned. It might be well to try 
and imitate them, if imitation had any salt in it, 
which it has not ; or if it were possible to do what 
they did with their different inspiration, which it is 
not. Mr. Stevenson is, I think, an example of the 
danger of essaying this latter in literature, just as a 
dozen eminent painters of less talent — for no one 
has so much talent as Mr. Stevenson — are examples 
in painting. But there are a thousand things, not 



96 FRENCH ART 

only in the technic of the romanticists but in their 
whole attitude toward their art and their material, 
that are nowadays impossible to sincere and sponta- 
neous artists. Details which have no importance 
whatever in the ensemble of the romantic artist are 
essential to the realist. Art does not stand still. 
Its canons change. There is a constant evolution 
in its standards, its requirements. A conventional 
background is no more an error in French classic 
painting than in tapestry ; a perfunctory scheme of 
pure chiaro-oscuro is no blemish in one of Diaz's 
splendid forest landscapes ; such phenomena in a 
work of Raffaelli or Pointelin would jar, because, 
measured by the standards to which modern men 
must, through the very force of evolution itself, sub- 
scribe, they can but appear solecisms. In a differ- 
ent set of circumstances, under a different inspu-a- 
tion, and with a different artistic attitude, solecisms 
they cei-tainly are not. But, as Lady Kew says to 
Ethel Newcome : " You belong to your belong- 
ings." Our circumstances, inspiration, artistic at- 
titude, are involuntary and possess us as our other 
belongings do. 

In Gautier's saying, for instance, "I am a man for 
whom the visible world exists," which I have quoted 
as expressing the key-note of the romantic epoch, it 
is to be noted that the visible world is taken as a 
spectacle simply — significant, suggestive or merely 



REALISTIC FAULTING 97 

stimulant, in accordance with individual bent. Gau- 
tier and the romanticists generally had little concern 
for its structure. To many of them it was indeed 
rather a canvas than a spectacle even — ^just as to 
many, if not to most, of the realists it is its structure 
rather than its significance that altogether appeals ; 
the romanticists in general sketched their ideas and 
impressions upon it, as the naturalists have in the 
main studied its aspects and constitution, careless of 
the import of these, pictorially or otherwise. In- 
deed one is tempted often to inquire of the latter, 
Why so much interest in what apparently seems to 
you of so little import ? Are we never to have your 
skill, your observation, your amassing of "docu- 
ments " turned to any account ? Where is the real- 
istic tragedy, comedy, epic, composition of any sort ? 
Courbet's "Cantonniers," Manet's "Bar," orBastien- 
Lepage's "Joan of Arc," perhaps. But what is in- 
disputable is, that we are irretrievably committed to 
the present general sesthetic attitude and inspiration, 
and must share not only the romanticists' impatience 
with academic formulae and conventions, but the real- 
ists' devotion to life and the world as they actually 
exist. The future may be different, but we are living 
in the present, and what is important is, after all, to 
live. It is also so difficult that not to take the line 
of least resistance is fatuity. 



FKENCH ART 



n 



It is at least an approximation to ascribe the pri- 
macy of realism to Courbet, though ascriptions of the 
kind are at best approximations. Not only was he 
the first, or among the first, to feel the interest and 
importance of the actual world as it is and for what 
it is rather than for what it suggests, but his feel- 
ing in this direction is intenser than that of any- 
one else. Manet was preoccupied with the values of 
objects and spaces. Bastien-Lepage, while painting 
these with the most scrupulous fidelity, was never- 
theless always attentive to the significance and im- 
port of what he painted. Courbet was a pure pan- 
theist. He was possessed by the material, the phys- 
ical, the actual. He never varies it a hair's-breadth. 
He never hfts it a fraction of a degree. But by his 
very absorption in it he dignifies it immensely. He 
illustrates magnificently its possibilities. He brings 
out into the plainest possible view its inherent, in- 
tegral, aesthetic quality, independent of any ex- 
traneity. No painter ever succeeded so well with 
so httle art, one is tempted to say. Beside his, the 
love of nature which we ascribe to the ordinary 
realist is a superficial emotion. He had the senti- 
ment of reality in the highest degree ; he had it in- 
tensely. If he did not represent nature with the 



EEALISTIC PAH^TIITG 99 

searching subtlety of later painters, lie is certainly 
the forerunner of naturalism. He has absolutely no 
ideality. He is blind to all intimations of immortal- 
ity, all unearthly voices. 

Yet it would be wholly an error to suppose 
him a mere literalist. No one is farther removed 
from the painstaking, grubbing imitators of detail 
so justly denounced and ridiculed by Mr. Whistler. 
He has the generalizing faculty in very distin- 
guished degree, and in very large measure. Every 
trait of his talent, indeed, is large, manly ; but 
for a certain quaHfication — which must be made 
— one might add, Olympian. This qualification 
perhaps may be not unfairly described as earthi- 
ness — never an agreeable trait, and one to which 
probably is due the depreciation of Courbet that 
is so popular even among appreciative critics. It 
is easy to characterize Courbet as brutal and 
material, but what is easy is generally not exact. 
What one glibly stigmatizes as brutality and gross- 
ness may, after all, be something of a particularly 
strong savor, enjoyed by the painter himself with a 
gusto too sterling and instinctive to be justifiably 
neglected, much less contemned. The first thing to 
do in estimating an artist's accomplishment, which 
is to place one's self at his point of view, is, in Cour- 
bet's case, unusually difficult. We are all dreamers, 
more or less — in more or less desultory fashion — 



LofG. 



100 FRENCH ART 

and can all appreciate that prismatic turn of what is 
real and actual into a position wherein it catches 
gHnts of the imagination. The imagination is a 
universal touchstone. The sense of reality is a 
special, an individual faculty. When one is poetiz- 
ing in an amateur, a dilettante way, as most of us 
poetize, a picture of Courbet, which seems to flaunt 
and challenge the imagination in virtue of its defiant 
reality, its insistence on the value and significance 
of the prosaic and the actual, appears coarse and 
crude. It is not, however. It is very far from that. 
It is rather elemental than elementary — in itself a 
prodigious distinction. No modern painter has felt 
more intensely and reproduced more vigorously the 
sap that runs through and vivifies the various forms 
of natural phenomena. To censure his shortcom- 
ings, to regret his imaginative incompleteness, is to 
miss him altogether. 

It is easy to say he had all the coarseness without 
the sentiment of the French peasantry, whence he 
sprang ; that his political radicalism attests a lack 
of the serenity of spirit indispensable to the sincere 
artist ; that he had no conception of the beautiful, 
the exquisite — the fact remains that he triumphs 
over all his deficiencies, and in very splendid fashion. 
He is, in truth, of all the realists for whom he dis- 
covered the way, and set the pace, as it were, one of 
the two naturalistic painters who have shown in any 



REALISTIC PAINTIlS-a 101 

liigh degree the supreme artistic faculty — that of 
generalization. However impressive Manet's pict- 
ure may be ; however brilliant Monet's endeavor to 
reproduce sunlight may seem ; however refined 
and elegant Degas's delicate selection of pictorial 
material — for broad and masterful generalization, 
for enduing what he painted with an interest deeper 
than its surface and underlying its aspect, Courbet 
has but one rival among realistic painters. I mean, 
of course, Bastien-Lepage. 

There is an important difference between the two. 
In Courbet the sentiment of reality dominates the 
realism of the technic ; in Bastien-Lepage the tech- 
nic is realistically carried infinitely farther, but the 
sentiment quite transcends realism. Imagine Cour- 
bet essaying a "Jeanne d'Arc!" Bastien-Lepage 
painting Courbet's " Cantonniers " would not have 
stopped, as Courbet has done, with expressing their 
vitality, their actual interest, but at the same time 
that he represented them in far greater technical 
completeness he would also have occupied himself 
with their psychology. He is indeed quite as dis- 
tinctly a psychologist as he is a painter. His favor- 
ite problem, aside from that of technical perfection, 
which perhaps equally haunted him, is the rendering 
of that resigned, bewildered, semi-hypnotic, vaguely 
and yet intensely longing spiritual expression to be 
noted by those who have the eyes to see it in the faces 



102 FRENCH ART 

and attitudes now of the peasant laborer, now of 
the city pariah. All his peasant women are poten- 
tially Jeannes d' Arc — "LesFoins," "Tired," "Petite 
Fauvette," for example. The " note " is still more 
evident in the " London Bootblack " and the "Lon- 
don Flower-girl," in which the outcast " East End " 
spiritlessness of the British capital is caught and 
fixed with a Zola-like veracity and vigor. Such a 
phase as this is not so much pictorial or poetic, as 
psychological. Bastien-Lepage's happiness in ren- 
dering it is a proof of the exceeding quickness and 
sureness of his observation ; but his preoccupation 
with it is equally strong proof of his interest in the 
things of the mind as well as in those of the senses. 
This is his great distinction, I think. He beats the 
realist on his own ground (except perhaps Monet 
and his followers — I remember no attempt of his to 
paint sunlight), but he is imaginative as well. He 
is not, on the other hand, to be in anywise associated 
with the romanticists. Degas 's acid characterization 
of him, as "the Bouguereau of the modern move- 
ment," is only just, if we remember what very radi- 
cal and fundamental changes the " modern move- 
ment" implies in general attitude as well as in 
special expression. I should be inclined, rather, to 
apply the analogy to M. Dagnan-Boiiveret, though 
here, too, with many reserves looking mainly to the 
difference between true and vapid sentiment. 



EEALISTIC PAINTING 103 

It is interesting to note, however, the almost ex- 
clusively intellectual character of this imaginative 
side of Bastien-Lepage. He does not view his ma- 
terial with any apparent sympathy, such as one 
notes, or at all events divines, in Millet. Both were 
French peasants ; but whereas Millet's interest in 
his fellows is instinctive and absorbing, Bastien- 
Lepage's is curious and detached. K his pictures 
ever succeed in moving us, it is impersonally, in 
virtue of the camera-like scrutiny he brings to bear 
on his subject, and the effectiveness with which he 
renders it, and of the reflections which we insti- 
tute of ourselves, and which he fails to stimulate 
by even the faintest trace of a loving touch or the 
betrayal of any sympathetic losing of himself in 
his theme. You feel just the least intimation of 
the doctrinaire, the systematic aloofness of the 
spectator. In moral attitude as well as in tech- 
nical expression he no more assimilates the vari- 
ous phases of his material, to reproduce them af- 
terward in new and original combination, than he 
expresses the essence of landscape in general, as 
the Fontainebleau painters do even in their most 
photographic moments. Both his figures and his 
landscapes are clearly portraits — -typical and not 
merely individual, to be sure, but somehow not ex- 
actly creations. His skies are the least successful 
portions of his pictures, I think ; one must gen- 



104 FRENCH ART 

eralize easily to make skies efifective, and perhaps 
it is not fanciful to note the frequency of high ho- 
rizons in his work. 

The fact remains that Bastien-Lepage stands at 
the head of the modern movement in many ways. 
His friend, M. Andre Theuriet, has shown, in a 
brochure published some years ago, that he was 
himself as interesting as his pictures. He took his 
art very seriously, and spoke of it with a dignity 
rather uncommon in the atmosphere of the studios, 
where there is apt to be more enthusiasm than re- 
flection. I recall vividly the impatience with which 
he once spoke to me of painting '* to show what you 
can do." His own standard was always the particu- 
lar ideal he had formed, never within the reach of 
his ascertained powers. And whatever he did, one 
may say, illustrates the sincerity and elevation of 
this remark, whether one's mood incline one to care 
most for this psychological side — undoubtedly the 
more nearly unique side — of his work, or for such 
exquisite things as his " Forge " or the portrait of 
Mme Sarah Bernhardt. Incontestably he has the 
true tradition, aud stands in the line of the great 
painters. And he owes his permanent place amoDg 
them not less to his perception that painting has 
a moral and significant, as well as a representa- 
tive and decorative sanction, than to his perfect 
harmony with his own time in his way of illus- 



EEALISTIC PAINTING 105 

trating this — to his happy fusion of aspect admir- 
ably rendered with profound and stimulating sug- 
gestion. 

m 

Or the realistic landscape painters, the strict im- 
pressionists apart, none is more eminent than M. 
Cazin, whose work is full of interest, and if at times 
it leaves one a little cold, this is perhaps an affair of 
the beholder's temperament rather than of M. Caz- 
in's. He is a thoroughly original painter, and, what 
is more at the present day, an imaginative one. He 
sees in his own way the nature that we all see, and 
paints it not literally but personally. But his land- 
scapes invariably attest, above all, an attentive study 
of the phenomena of light and air, and their truth- 
fulness is the more marked for the personality they 
illustrate. The impression they make is of a very 
clairvoyant and enthusiastic observation exercised by 
an artist who takes more pleasure in appreciation 
than in expression, whose pleasure in his expression 
is subordinate to his interest in the external world, 
and in large measure confined to the delight every 
artist has in technical feHcity when he can attain it. 
Their skies are beautifully observed — graduated in 
value with delicate verisimilitude from the horizon 
up, and wind-swept, or drenched with mist, or ring- 
ing clear, as the motive may dictate. All objects 



106 FRENCH ART 

take their places with a precision that, neverthe- 
less, is in nowise pedantic, and is perfectly free. 
Cazin's palette is, moroever, a thoroughly individual 
one. It is very pure, and if its range is not great, it 
is at any rate not grayed into insipidity and ineffect- 
ualness, but is as positive as if it were more vivid. A 
distinct air of elegance, a true sense of style, is note- 
worthy in many of his pictures ; not only in the im- 
portant ones, but occasionally when the theme is so 
slight as to need hardly any composition whatever — 
the mere placing of a tree, its outline, its relation to 
a bank or a roadway, are often unmistakably distin- 
guished. Cazin is not exclusively a landscape painter, 
and though the landscape element in all his works 
is a dominant one, even in his " Hagar and Ishmael 
in the Desert," and his " Judith Setting out for 
Holofernes's Camp " (in which latter one can hardly 
identify the heroine at all), the fact that he is not a 
landscape painter, pure and simple, like Harpignies 
and Pointelin, perhaps accounts for his inferiority 
to them in landscape sentiment. In France it is 
generally assumed that to devote one's self exclus- 
ively to any one branch of painting is to betray limi- 
tations, and there are few painters who would not 
resent being called landscapists. Something, per- 
haps, is lost in this way. It witnesses a greater 
pride in accomplishment than in instinctive bent. 
But however that may be, Cazin never penetrates 



EEALISTIC PAINTIl^TG 107 

to the sentiment of nature that one feels in such a 
work as Harpignies's "Moonrise," for example, or in 
almost any of Pointelin's grave and impressive land- 
scapes. Hardly less truthful, I should say, though 
perhaps less intimately and elaborately real (a roman- 
ticist would say less superficially real) than Cazin's, 
the work of both these painters is more pictorial. 
They have a quicker sense for the beautiful, I think. 
They feel very certainly much more deeply the sug- 
gestiveness of a scene. They are not so debonnaires 
in the presence of their problems. In a sense, for 
that reason, they understand them better. There is 
very little feeling of the desert, the illimitable space, 
where, according to Balzac, God is and man is not, 
in the " Hagar and Ishmael ; " indeed there seems 
to have been no attempt on the part of the painter 
to express any. True as his sand-heap is, you feel 
somehow that there may be a kitchen-garden or the 
entrance to a coal-mine on the other side of it, or 
a little farther along. And the landscape of the 
"Judith," fine as its sweep is, and admirable as 
are the cool tone and clear distance of the picture, 
might really be that of the " south meadow *' of 
some particular " farm " or other. 

The contrast which Guillaumet presents to Fro- 
mentin affords a very striking illustration of the 
growth of the realistic spirit in recent years. Fro- 
mentin is so admirable a painter that I can hardly 



108 FRENCH ART 

fancy any appreciative person wishing him differ- 
ent. His devoted admirer and biographer, M. Louis 
Gonse, admits, and indeed expressly records, Fro- 
mentin's own lament over the insufficiency of his 
studies. Fond as he was of horses, for instance, he 
does not know them as a draughtsman with the 
science of such a conventional painter in many other 
respects as Schreyer. But it is not in the slightly 
amateurish nature of his technical equipment — real- 
ized perfectly by himself, of course, as the first critic 
of the technic of painting among all who have ven- 
tured upon the subject — that his painting differs 
from Guillaumet's. It is his whole point of view. His 
Africa is that of the critic, the litterateur, the raffine. 
Guillaumet's is Africa itself. You feel before Guil- 
laumet's Luxembourg canvases, as in looking over 
the shghtest of his vivid memoranda, that you are 
getting in an acute and concentrated form the sen- 
sations which the actual scenes and types rendered 
by the painter would stimulate in you, supposing, 
of course, that you were sufficiently sensitive. Fro- 
mentin, in comparison, is occupied in picture-mak- 
ing — giving you a beautifully colored and highly 
intelligent pictorial report as against Guillaumet's 
actual reproduction. There is no question as to 
which of the two painters has the greater personal 
interest ; but it is just as certain that for abiding 
value and enduring charm personal interest must 



REALISTIC PAINTING 10^ 

either be extremely great or else yield to the in- 
terest inherent in the material dealt with, an in- 
terest that Guillaumet brings out with a fehcity 
and a puissance that are wholly extraordinary, and 
that nowadays meet with a readier and more sym- 
pathetic recognition that even such delicate perso- 
nal charm as that of Fromentin. 

IV 

So thoroughly has the spirit of realism fastened 
upon the artistic effort of the present that tempera- 
ments least inclined toward interest in the actual feel 
its influences, and show the effects of these. The 
most recalcitrant illustrate this technically, however 
rigorously they may preserve their point of view. 
They paint at least more circumspectly, however they 
may think and feel. An historical painter like Jean 
Paul Laurens, interested as he is in the memorable 
moments and dramatic incidents of the past, and 
exhibiting as he does, first of all, a sense of what is 
ideally forceful and heroic, is nevertheless clearly 
concerned for the realistic value of his representa- 
tion far more than a generation ago he would have 
been. When Luminals paints a scene from Gaulish 
legend, he is not quite, but nearly, as careful to 
make it pictorially real as he is to have it dramati- 
cally effective. M. Fran9ois Flameng, expanding 



110 FRElSrCH AET 

his book illustration into a mammoth canvas com- 
memorative of the Vendean insun-ection, is almost 
daintily fastidious about the naturalistic aspect of 
his abundant detail. M. Benjamin-Constant's arti- 
ficially conceived seraglio scenes are as realistically 
rendered as is indicated by a recent caricature de- 
picting an astonished sneak - thief, foiled in an at- 
tempted rape of the jewels in a sultana's diadem, 
painted v^ith such deceptive illusoriness by M. 
BeDJamin-Constant's clever brush. The military 
painters, Detaille, De Neuville, Berne-Bellecour, do 
not differ from Vernet more by painting incidents 
instead of phases of warfare, by substituting the 
touch of dramatic genre for epic conceptions, than 
they do by the scrupulously naturalistic rendering 
that in them supplants the old academic symbolism. 
Their dragoons and fantassins are not merely more 
real in what they do, but in how they look. Ver- 
net's look like tin soldiers by comparison ; certainly 
like soldiers de convenance. Aime Morot evidently 
used instantaneous photography, and his magnifi- 
cent cavalry charges suggest not only carnage, but 
Muybridge as well. 

The great portrait - painters of the day — Carolus- 
Duran, Bonnat, Ribot — are reahsts to the core. 
They are very far fi'om being purely portrait-painters 
of course, and their realism shows itself with splen- 
did distinction in other works. Few painters of the 



EEALISTIC PAITTTING 111 

nude have anything to their credit as fine as the 
figure M, Carolus-Duran exhibited at the Paris Ex- 
position in 1889. Eibot's " Saint Sebastian '' is one 
of the most powerful pictures of modern French art. 
Bonnat's " Christ " became at once famous. Each 
picture is painted with a vigor and point of reahstic 
detail that are peculiar to our own time ; painted 
to-day, Bonnat's fine and sculptural "Fellah Wom- 
an and Child," of the Metropolitan Museum, would 
be accented in a dozen ways in which now it is not. 
But it is perhaps in portraiture that the eminence 
of these painters is most expHcit. They are at the 
head of contemporary portraitists, at all events. 
And their portraits are almost defiantly real, void 
often of arrangement, and as little artificial as the 
very frequently prosaic atmosphere appertaining to 
their sometimes very stark subjects suggests. A 
portrait by Bonnat blinks nothing in the subject ; 
its aim and accomplishment are the rendering of 
the character in a vivid fashion — including the 
reproduction of cobalt cravats and creased trousers 
even — which would have mightily embarrassed 
Van Dyck or Velasquez. Ribot reproduces Ribera 
often, but he deals with fewer externals, fewer 
effects, taken in the widest sense. Carolus-Duran, 
the "swell" portrait-painter of the day, artificial 
as he may be in the quality of his mind, never- 
theless seeks and attains, first of all, the sense of 



112 FEENCH ART 

an even exaggerated life - likeness in his charm- 
ing sitters. They are, first of all, people ; the 
pictorial element takes care of itself; sometimes 
even — so overmastering is the realistic tendency — 
the plush of the chair, the silk of the robe, the cut 
of the coat, seems, to an observer who thinks of the 
old traditions of Titian, of Raphael, of Moroni, un- 
duly emphasized, even for realism. 



One element of modernity is a certain order of ec- 
lecticism. It is not the eclecticism of the Bolognese 
painters, for example, illustrating the really hopeless 
attempt to combine the supposed and superficial 
excellences, always dissociated from the essence, of 
different points of view. It is a free choice of atti- 
tude, rather, due to the release of the individual 
from the thraldom of conformity that ruled even dur- 
ing the romantic epoch. Hence a great deal of ad- 
mirable work, of which one hardly thinks whether 
it is reahstic or not, side by side with the more em- 
phatic expressions of the realistic spirit. And this 
work is of all degrees of realism, never, however, 
getting very far away from the naturalistic basis on 
which more and more everyone is coming to insist 
as the necessary and only solid pedestal of any flight 
of fancy. Baudry is perhaps the nearest of the really 



REALISTIC PAINTING 113 

great men to the Bolognese order of eclecticism. I 
suppose lie must be classed among the really great 
men, so many painters of intelligence place him 
there, though I must myself plead the laic privilege 
of a slight scepticism as to whether time will approve 
their enthusiasm. He is certainly very effective, and 
in certainly his own way, idle as it is to say that 
his drafts on the great Italians are no greater than 
those of Raphael on the antique frescos. He had 
a great love of color and a native instinct for it ; 
with perhaps more appreciation than invention, his 
imagination has something very personal in the 
zealous enthusiasm with which he exercised it, 
though I think it must be admitted that his reflec- 
tions of Tiepolo, Titian, Tintoretto and his attenu- 
ated expansions of Michael Angelo's condensed gran- 
diosity, recall the eclecticism of the Carracci far 
more than that of Eaphael. But his manner is the 
modern manner, and it is altogether more effect- 
ive, more ''fetching," to use a modern term, than 
anything purely academic can be. Elie Delaunay, 
another master of decoration, is, on the other hand, 
as real as the most rigorous literalist could ask of a 
painter of decorative works. Chartran, who has an 
individual charm that both Baudry and Delaunay 
lack, inferior as he is to them in sweep and power, 
is perhaps in this respect midway between the two. 
Clairin is, like Mazerolles, a pure fantaisiste. Du- 



114 FEENCH ART 

huiefils, whose at least equally famous father ranks 
in a somewhat similar category with Couture, shows 
a distinct advance upon him in reality of rendering, 
as the term would be understood at present. 

In other departments of painting the note of 
realism is naturally still more universally apparent ; 
but as in the work of the painters of decoration it is 
often most noticeable as an undertone, indicating a 
point of departure rather than an aim. Bonvin is a 
realist only as Chardin, as Van der Meer of Delft, as 
Nicholas Maes were, before the jargon of realism 
had been thought of. He is, first of all, an exquisite 
artist, in love with the beautiful in reality, finding 
it in the humblest material, and expressing it with 
the gentlest, sweetest, aesthetic severity and compos- 
ure imaginable. The most fastidious critic needs 
but a touch of human feeling to convert any char- 
acterization of this most refined and elevated of 
painters into pure panegyric. VoUon's touch is fe- 
licity itself, and it is evident that he takes more 
pleasure in exercising and exploiting it than in its 
successful imitation, striking as its imitative qual- 
ity is. Gervex and Duez are very much more 
than impressionists, both in theory and practice. 
There is nothing polemic in either. Painters extol 
in the heartiest way the color, the creative color- 
ation of Gervex's '' Rolla,*' quite aside from its 
dramatic force or its truth of aspect. Personal 



EEALISTIC PAINTING 115 

feeling is clearly the inspiration of every work of 
Duez, not the demonstration of a theory of treating 
light and atmosphere. The same may be said of 
Roll at his best, as in his superb rendering of what 
may be called the modern painter's conception of 
the myth of Europa. Compared with Paul Vero- 
nese's admirable classic, that violates all the uni- 
ties (which Veronese, nevertheless, may readily 
be pardoned by all but literalists and theorists for 
neglecting), this splendid nude girl in plein air, 
flecked with splotches of sunlight filtered through a 
sieve of leafage, with her realistic taurine compan- 
ion, and their environment of veridically rendered 
out-of-doors, may stand for an illustrative definition 
of modernity ; but what you feel most of all is Roll. 
It is ten chances to one that he has never even 
been to Venice or thought of Veronese. He has 
not always been so successful ; as when in his 
"Work" he earned Degas's acute comment: "A 
crowd is made with five persons, not with fifty." 
("B y a cinquante figures, mais je ne vois pas la 
foule ; on fait une foule avec cinq, et non pas avec 
cinquante.") But he has always been someone. 
Compare with him L'Hermitte, a painter who il- 
lustrates sometimes the possibility of being an arti- 
ficial realist. His '* Vintage " at the Metropolitan 
Museum, his " Harvesters " at the Luxembourg, are 
excellently real and true in detail, but in idea and 



116 FEENCH AET 

general expression they might compete for the prix 
de Kome. The same is measurably true of Lerolle, 
whose pictures are more sympathetic — sometimes 
they are very sympathetic — but on the whole dis- 
play less power. But in each instance the advocate 
a outrance of realism may justly, I think, maintain 
that a painter with a natural predisposition toward 
the insipidity of the academic has been saved from 
it by the inherent sanity and robustness of the real- 
istic method. Jean Beraud, even, owes something 
to the way in which his verisimilitude of meth- 
od has reinforced his artistic powers. His delight- 
ful Parisiennes — modistes' messengers crossing wet 
glistening pavements against a background of gray 
mist accented with poster-bedizened kiosks and reg- 
ularly recuiTing horse-chestnut trees ; elegantes at 
prayer, in somewhat distracted mood, on prie-dieus 
in the vacant and vapid Paris churches ; seated at 
cafe tables on the busy, leisurely boulevards, or pos- 
ing tout honnement for the reproduction of the most 
fascinating feminine ensemble in the world — owe 
their charm (I may say again their " fetchingness ") 
to the faithfulness with which their portraitist has 
studied, and the fidelity with which he has repro- 
duced, their differing types, more than to any per- 
sonal expression of his own view of them. Fancy 
Beraud's masterpiece, the Salle Graffard— that ad- 
mirable characterization of crankdom embodied in a 



EEALISTIC PAINTING 117 

socialist reunion — painted by an academic painter. 
How absolutely it would lose its pith, its force, its 
significance, even its true distinction. And his 
" Magdalen at the Pharisee's House," which is almost 
equally impressive — far more impressive of course in 
a literary and, I think, legitimate, sense — owes even 
its literary effectiveness to its significant realism. 

What the illustrators of the present day owe to 
the naturalistic method, it is almost superfluous to 
point out. "Illustrators" in France are, lq general, 
painters as well, some of them very eminent paint- 
ers. Daumier, who passed in general for a contrib- 
utor to illustrated journals, even such journals as Le 
Fetit Journal pour Eire, was not only a genius of 
the first rank, but a painter of the first class. Mon- 
vel and Montenard at present are masterly painters. 
But in their illustration as well as in their paint- 
ing, they show a notable change from the illustra- 
tion of the days of Daumier and Dore. The dif- 
ference between the elegant (or perhaps rather the 
handsome) drawings of Bida, an artist of the ut- 
most distinction, and that of the illustrators of the 
present day who are comparable with him — their 
name is not legion — is a special attestation of the 
influence of the realistic ideal in a sphere wherein, 
if anywhere, one may say, realism reigns legiti- 
mately, but wherein also the conventional is especi- 
ally to be expected. One cannot indeed be quite 



118 FRENCH ART 

sure that the temptations of the conventional are re- 
sisted by the ultra-realistic illustrators of our own 
time, Kossi, Beaumont, Albert Lynch, Myrbach. 
They have certainly a very handy way of expressing 
themselves ; one would be justified in suspecting 
the labor - saving, the art - sparing kodak, behind 
many of their most unimpeachable successes. But 
the attitude taken is quite other than it used to be, 
and the change that has come over French aesthetic 
activity in general can be noted in very sharp defini- 
tion by comparing a book illustrated twenty years 
ago by Albert Lynch, with, for example, Maupassant's 
"Pierre et Jean," the distinguished realism of whose 
text is adequately paralleled — and the implied 
eulogy is by no means trivial — by the pictorical 
commentary, so to speak, which this first of mod- 
ern illustrators has supplied. And an even more 
striking illustration of the evolution of realistic 
thought and feeling, as well as of rendering, is fur- 
nished by the succession of Forain to Grevin, as 
an illustrator of the follies of the day, the charac- 
teristic traits of the Parisian seamy side, morally 
speaking. Grevin is as conventional as Murger, 
in philosophy, and — though infinitely cleverer — as 
"Mars" in drawing. Forain, with the pencil of a 
realism truly Japanese, illustrates with sympathetic 
incisiveness the pitiless pessimism of Flaubert, Gon- 
court, and Maupassant as well. 



EEALISTIC PAINTING 119 



VI 



But to go back a little and consider the puissant 
individualities, the great men who have really given 
its direction to and, as it were, set the pace of, the 
realistic movement, and for whom, in order more con- 
veniently to consider impressionism pure and sim- 
ple by itself, I have ventured to disturb the chron- 
ological sequence of evolution in French painting 
— a sequence that, even if one care more for ideas 
than for chronology, it is more temerarious to vary 
from in things French than in any others. To 
go back in a word to Manet ; the painter of whom 
M. Henri Houssaye has remarked : " Manet sowed, 
M. Bastien-Lepage has reaped." 

Manet was certainly one of the most noteworthy 
painters that France or any other country has pro- 
duced. His is the great, the very rare, merit of 
having conceived a new point of view. That he did 
not illustrate this in its completeness, that he was a 
sign-post, as Albert Wolff very aptly said, rather an 
exemplar, is nothing. He was totally unheralded, 
and he was in his way superb. No one before him 
had essayed — no one before him had ever thought 
of — the immense project of breaking, not relatively 
but absolutely, with the conventional. Looking for 



120 FEEI^CH AKT 

the first time at one of his pictures, one says that 
customary notions, ordinary brushes, traditional 
processes of even the highest authenticity, have 
been thrown to the winds. Hence, indeed, the 
scandal which he caused from the first and which 
went on increasing, until, owing to the acceptance, 
with modifications, of his point of view by the most 
virile and vigorous painters of the day, he became, 
as he has become, in a sense the head of the cor- 
ner. Manet^s great distinction is to have discovered 
that the sense of reality is achieved with a thousand- 
fold greater intensity by getting as near as possible 
to the actual, rather than resting content with the 
relative, value of every detail. Everyone who has 
painted since Manet has either followed him in this 
effort or has appeared, to this extent, jejune. 

Take as an illustration of the contrary practice 
such a masterpiece in its way as Gerome's ^^ Emi- 
nence Grise.^' In this picture, skilfully and satis- 
factorily composed, the relative values of all the 
colors are admirably, even beautifully, observed. 
The correspondence of the gamut of values to that 
of the light and dark scale of such an actual scene 
is perfect. Before Manet, one could have said that 
this is all that is requisite or desirable, arguing that 
exact imitation of local tints and general tone is 
impossible, owing to the difference between nature's 
highest light and lowest dark, and the potentiali- 



REALISTIC PAINTING 121 

ties of the palette. First determine the scale of 
your picture and then make every note in it bear 
the same relation to every other that the corre- 
sponding note in nature bears to its fellows in its 
own corresponding but different scale. And this 
view seemed so rational as applied to out-of-doors 
that it governed equally the painting of interiors, 
where exact imitation of local values, had it been 
thought of, would have been seen to be obviously 
far more nearly attainable. This is what G6r6me 
has done in the ^^ Eminence Grise^^— a scene, it 
will be remembered, on a staircase in a palace in- 
terior. Manet inquires what would happen to this 
house of cards shored up into verisimilitude by 
mere correspondence, if Gr6r6me had been asked to 
cut a window in his staircase and admit the light 
of out-of-doors into his correspondent but artificial 
scene. The whole thing would have to be done 
over again. The scale of the picture running from 
the highest palette white to the lowest palette 
dark, and yet the key of an actual interior scene 
being much nearer middle-tint than the tint of 
an actual out-of-doors scene, it would be impossi- 
ble to paint with any verisimilitude the illumina- 
tion of a window from the outside, the resources 
of the palette having already been exhausted, every 
object having been given a local value solely with 
relation, so far as truth of representation is con- 



122 FPwET^CH AET 

cerned, to tlie values of every other object, and no 
effort being made to get the precise value of the 
object as it would appear under analogous circum- 
stances in nature. 

It may be replied, and I confess I think with ex- 
cellent reason, that Gerome^s picture has no win- 
dow in it, and therefore that to ask of him to paint 
a picture as he should if he were painting a differ- 
ent picture, is pedantry. The old masters are still 
admirable, though they only observed a correspon- 
dence to the actual scale of natural values, and 
were not concerned with imitation of it. But it 
is to be observed that, successful as their practice 
is, it is successful in virtue of the unconscious co- 
operation of the beholder's imagination. And now- 
adays the one thing that is insisted on as a starting- 
point and basis, at the very least, is the sense of 
reality. And it is impossible to exaggerate the way 
in which the sense of reality has been intensified by 
Manet's insistence upon getting as near as possible 
to the individual values of objects as they are seen 
in nature— in spite of his abandonment of the 
practice of painting on a parallel scale. Things 
now drop into their true place, look as they really 
do, and count as they count in nature, because the 
painter is no longer content with giving us change 
for nature, but tries his best to give us nature it- 
self. Perspective acquires its actual significance, 



REALISTIC PAINTING 123 

solids have substance and bulk as well as surfaces, 
distance is perceived as it is in nature, by the actual 
interposition of atmosphere, chiaro-oscuro is abol- 
ished — the ways in which reality is secured being 
in fact legion the moment real instead of relative 
values are studied. Something is lost, very likely 
— an artist cannot be so intensely preoccupied with 
reality as, since Manet, it has been incumbent on 
painters to be, without missing a whole range of 
qualities that are so precious as rightly perhaps to 
be considered indispensable. Until reality becomes 
in its turn an effect unconsciously attained, the 
painter's imagination will be held more or less in 
abeyance. And perhaps we are justified in thinking 
that nothing can quite atone for its absence. Mean- 
time, however, it must be acknowledged that Ma- 
net first gave us this sense of reality in a measure 
comparable with that which successively Balzac, 
Flaubert, Zola gave to the readers of their books — 
a sense of actuality and vividness beside which the 
traditionary practice seemed absolutely fanciful and 
mechanical. 

Applying Manet's method, his invention, his dis- 
covery, to the painting of out-of-doors, the plein air 
school immediately began to produce landscapes of 
astonishing reality by confining their effort to those 
values which it is in the power of pigments to imi- 
tate. The possible scale of mere correspondence 



124 FRETq"CH ART 

being of course from one to one hundred, they se- 
cured greater truth by painting between twenty and 
eighty, we may say. Hence the grayness of the 
most successful French landscapes of the present 
day — those of Bastien-Lepage's backgrounds, of 
Cazin's pictures. Sunlight being unpaintable, they 
confined themselves to the representation of what 
they could represent. In the interest of truth, of 
reality, they narrowed the gamut of their modula- 
tions, they attempted less, upheld by the certainty 
of accomplishing more. For a time French land- 
scape was pitched in a minor key. Suddenly Claude 
Monet appeared. Impressionism, as it is now un- 
derstood, and as Manet had not succeeded in popu- . 
larizing it, won instant recognition. Monet's dis- 
covery was that light is the most important factor 
in the painting of out-of-doors. He pushed up the 
key of landscape painting to the highest power. He 
attacked the fascinating, but of course demonstrably 
insolvable, problem of painting sunlight, not illusor- 
ily, as Fortuny had done by relying on contrasts of 
light and dark correspondent in scale, but positively 
and realistically. He realized as nearly as possible 
the effect of sunlight— that is to say, he did as well 
and no better in this respect than Fortuny had done 
— but he created a much greater illusion of a sunlit 
landscape than anyone had ever done before him, 
by painting those parts of his picture not in sun- 



EEALISTIC PAIIS^TII^G 125 

light with the exact truth that in painting objects in 
shadow the palette can compass. 

Nothing is more simple. Take a landscape with 
a cloudy sky, which means diffused light in the old 
sense of the term, and observe the effect upon it 
of a sudden burst of sunlight. "What is the effect 
where considerable portions of the scene are sud- 
denly thrown into marked shadow, as well as others 
illuminated with intense hght? Is the absolute 
value of the parts in shadow lowered or raised? 
Eaised, of course, by reflected light. Formerly, to 
get the contrast between sunHght and shadow in 
proper scale, the painter would have painted the 
shadows darker than they were before the sun ap- 
peared. Kelatively they are darker, since their val- 
ue, though heightened, is raised infinitely less than 
the value of the parts in sunlight. Absolutely, their 
value is raised considerably. If, therefore, they are 
painted lighter than they were before the sun ap- 
peared, they in themselves seem truer. The part 
of Monet's picture that is in shadow is measurably 
true, far truer than it would have been if painted 
under the old theory of correspondence, and had 
been unnaturally darkened to express the relation 
of contrast between shadow and sunhght. Scale 
has been lost. What has been gained? Simply 
truth of impressionistic effect. Why ? Because we 
know and judge and appreciate and feel the meas- 



126 FRENCH ART 

ure of truth with which objects in shadow are rep- 
resented ; we are insensibly more familiar with them 
in nature than with objects directly sun-illuminated, 
the value as well as the definition of which are far 
vaguer to us on account of their blending and in- 
finite heightening by a luminosity absolutely over- 
powering. In a word, in sunlit landscapes objects 
in shadow are what customarily and unconsciously 
we see and note and know, and the illusion is greater 
if the relation between them and the objects in sun- 
light, whose value habitually we do not note, be neg- 
lected or falsified. Add to this source of illusion 
the success of Monet in giving a juster value to the 
sunlit half of his picture than had even been sys- 
tematically attempted before his time, and his as- 
tonishing trompe-Voell is, I think, explained. Each 
part is truer than ever before, and unless one have 
a specially developed sense of ensemble in this very 
special matter of values in and affected by sunlight, 
one gets from Monet an impression of actuality so 
much greater than he has ever got before, that he 
may be pardoned for feeling, and even for enthusi- 
astically proclaiming, that in Monet realism finds its 
apogee. To sum up : The first realists painted rela- 
tive values ; Manet and his derivatives painted abso- 
lute values, but in a wisely limited gamut ; Monet 
paints absolute values in a very wide range, plus sun- 
light, as nearly as he can get it — as nearly as pigment 



REALISTIC PAINTIIS-O 127 

can be got to represent it. Perforce he loses scale, 
and therefore artistic completeness, but he secures 
an incomparably vivid effect of reality, of nature — 
and of nature in her gayest, most inspiring mani- 
festation, illuminated directly and in directly, and 
everywhere vibrant and palpitating with the light 
of all our physical seeing. 

Monet is so subtle in his own way, so superbly 
successful within his own limits, that it is time 
wasted to quarrel with the convention-steeped phil- 
istine who refuses to comprehend even his point of 
view, who judges the pictures he sees by the pictures 
he has seen. He has not only discovered a new way 
of looking at nature, but he has justified it in a 
thousand particulars. Concentrated as his attention 
has been upon the effects of light and atmosphere, 
he has reproduced an infinity of nature's moods that 
are charming in proportion to their transitoriness, 
and whose fleeting beauties he has caught and per- 
manently fixed. Rousseau made the most careful 
studies, and then combined them in his studio. 
Courbet made his sketch, more or less perfect, face ■ 
to face with his subject, and elaborated it afterward 
away from it. Corot painted his picture from nat- 
ure, but put the Corot into it in his studio. Mo- 
net's practice is in comparison drastically thorough. 
After thirty minutes, he says — why thirty instead of 
forty or twenty, I do not know ; these mysteries are 



128 FRENCH AET 

Eleusinian to the mere amateur — the light changes ; 
he must stop and return the next day at the same 
hour. The result is immensely real, and in Monet's 
hands immensely varied. One may say as much, 
having regard to their differing degrees of success, 
of Pissaro, who influenced him, and of Caillebotfce, 
Renoir, Sisley, and the rest of the impressionists who 
followed him. 

He is himself the prominent representative of 
the school, however, and the fact that one repre- 
sentative of it is enough to consider, is eloquent 
of profound criticism of it. For decorative pur- 
poses a hole in one's wall, an additional window 
through which one may only look satisfactorily dur- 
ing a period of thirty minutes, has its drawbacks. 
A walk in the country or in a city park is after all 
preferable to anyone who can really appreciate a 
Monet — that is, anyone who can feel the illusion of 
nature which it is his sole aim to produce. After 
all, what one asks of art is something different from 
imitative illusion. Its essence is illusion, I think, 
but illusion taken in a different sense from opti- 
cal illusion — trompe-Vceil. Its function is to make 
dreams seem real, not to recall reality. Monet is 
enduringly admirable mainly to the painter who 
envies and endeavors to imitate his wonderful power 
of technical expression — the thing that occupies most 
the conscious attention of the true painter. To 



EEALISTIC PAINTING 129 

others he must remain a little unsatisfactory, because 
he is not only not a dreamer, but because he does 
nothing with his material except to show it as it is — a 
great service surely, but largely excluding the ex- 
ercise of that architectonic faculty, personally di- 
rected, which is the very life of every truly aesthetic 
production. 

VII 

In fine, the impressionist has his own conventions ; 
no school can escape them, from the very nature of 
the case and the definition of the term. The con- 
ventions of the impressionists, indeed, are particu- 
larly salient. Can anyone doubt it who sees an ex- 
hibition of their works? In the same number of 
classic, or romantic, or merely realistic pictures, 
is there anything quite equalling the monotony 
that strikes one in a display of canvasses by Claude 
Monet and his fellows and followers ? But the 
defect of impressionism is not mainly its technical 
conventionality. It is, as I think everyone except 
its thick-and-thin advocates must feel, that pursued 
d, outrance it lacks a seriousness commensurate with 
its claims — that it exhibits indeed a kind of under- 
tone of frivolity that is all the nearer to the abso- 
lutely comic for the earnestness, so to speak, of its 
unconsciousness. The reason is, partly no doubt, 
to be ascribed to its debonnaire self-satisfaction, its 



130 FRENCH ART 

disposition to "lightly run amuck at an august 
thing," the traditions of centuries namely, to its 
bumptiousness, in a word. But chiefly, I think, the 
reason is to be found in its lack of anything properly 
to be called a philosophy. This is surely a fatal 
flaw in any system, because it involves a contradic- 
tion in terms ; and to say that to have no philosophy 
is the philosophy of the impressionists, is merely a 
word-juggling bit of question-begging. A theory 
of technic is not a philosophy, however systematic it 
may be. It is a mechanical, not an intellectual, 
point of view. It is not a way of looking at things, 
but of rendering them. It expresses no idea and 
sees no relations ; its claims on one's interest are ex- 
hausted when once its right to its method is ad- 
mitted. The remark once made of a typically literal 
person — that he cared so much for facts that he dis- 
liked to think they had any relations — is intimately 
applicable to the whole impressionist school. Tech- 
nically, of course, the impressionist's relations are 
extremely just — not exquisite, but exquisitely just. 
But merely to get just values is not to occupy one's 
self with values ideally, emotionally, personally. It 
is merely to record facts. Certainly any impres- 
sionist rendering of the light and shade and color 
relations of objects seems eloquent beside any tradi- 
tional and conventional rendering of them ; but it is 
because each object is so carefully observed, so truly 



REALISTIC PAINTIiq^G 131 

painted, that its relation to every other is spontane- 
ously satisfactory ; and this is a very different thing 
from the result of truly pictorial rendering with its 
constructive appeal, its sense of ensemble, its pres- 
entation of an idea by means of the convergence 
and interdependence of objects focussed to a com- 
mon and central effect. To this impressionism is 
absolutely insensitive. It is the acme of detach- 
ment, of indifference. 

Turgenieff, according to Mr. George Moore, com- 
plained of Zola's Gervaise Coupeau, that Zola ex- 
plained how she felt, never what she thought. 
" Qu'est que 9a me fait si elle suait sous les bras, ou 
au milieu du dos ? " he asked, with most pertinent 
penetration. He is quite right. Eeally we only care 
for facts when they explain truths. The desultory 
agglomeration of never so definitely rendered de- 
tails necessarily leaves the civilized appreciation 
cold. What distinguishes the civilized from the 
savage appreciation is the passion for order. The 
tendency to order, said Senancour, should form " an 
essential part of our inclinations, of our instinct, 
like the tendencies to self-preservation and to re- 
production." The two latter tendencies the savage 
possesses as completely as the civilized man, but he 
does not share the civilized man's instinct for corre- 
lation. And in this sense, I think, a certain sav- 
agery is justly to be ascribed to the impressionist. 



132 FRENCH ART 

His productions have many attractions and many 
merits — merits and attractions that the traditional 
painting has not. But they are really only by a 
kind of automatic inadvertence, pictures. They are 
not truly pictorial. 

And a picture should be something more than 
even pictorial. To be permanently attaching it 
should give at least a hint of the painter's philoso- 
phy — his point of view, his attitude toward his ma- 
terial. In the great pictures you can not only dis- 
cover this attitude, but the attitude of the painter 
toward life and the world in general. Everyone 
has as distinct an idea of the philosophy of Kaphael 
as of the qualities of his designs. The impression- 
ist not only does not show you what he thinks, he 
does not even show you how he feels, except by be- 
traying a fondness for violets and diffused light, and 
by exhibiting the temper of the radical and the 
rioter. The order of a blithe, idyllic landscape by 
Corot, of one of Delacroix's pieces of concentric 
coloration, of an example of Ingres's purity of out- 
line, shows not only temperament, but the position 
of the painter in regard to the whole intellectual 
world so far as he touches it at all. What does a 
canvas of Claude Monet show in this respect ? It is 
more truthful but not less impersonal than a photo- 
graph. 

Degas is the only other painter usually classed ► 



EEALISTIC PAINTING 133 

-with the impressionists, of whom this may not be 
said. But Degas is hardly an impressionist at all. 
He is one of the most personal painters, if not the 
most personal painter, of the day. He is as original 
as Puvis de Chavannes. What allies him with the 
impressionists is his fondness for fleeting aspects, 
his caring for nothing beyond aspect — for the look 
of things and their transitory look. He is an en- 
thusiastic admirer of Ingres — who, one would say, 
is the antithesis of impressionism. He never paints 
from nature. His studies are made with the utmost 
care, but they are arranged, composed, combined 
by his own sense of what is pictorial — by, at any 
rate, his own idea of the effects he wishes to create. 
He cares absolutely nothing for what ordinarily we 
understand by the real, the actual, so far as its 
reality is concerned ; he sees nothing else, to be 
sure, and is probably very sceptical about anything 
but colors and shapes and their decorative aiTange- 
ment ; but he sees what he likes in reality and fol- 
lows this out with an inerrancy so scrupulous, and 
€ven affectionate, as to convey the idea that in his 
result he himself counts for almost nothing. This 
at least may be said of him, that he shows what, 
given genius, can be got out of the impressionist 
method artistically and practically employed to the 
end of illustrating a personal point of view. A 
mere amateur can hardly distinguish between a 



134 FRENCH ART 

Caillebotte and a Sisley, for example, but everyone 
identifies a Degas as immediately and as certainly 
as he does a Whistler. His work is perfectly sin- 
cere and admirably intelligent. It has neither the 
pose nor the irresponsibility of the impressionists. 
His artistic apotheosis of the ballet-girl is merely 
the result of his happy discovery of something de- 
lightfully, and in a very true sense naturally, deco- 
rative in material that is in the highest degree arti- 
ficial. His impulse is as genuine and spontaneous 
as if the substance upon which it is exercised were 
not the acme of the exotic, and already arranged 
with the most elaborate conventionality. Nothing 
indeed could be more opposed to the elementary 
crudity of impressionism than his distinction and 
refinement, which may be said to be carried to a 
really ^71 de siMe degree. 

vm 

Whatever the painting of the future is to be, it is 
* certain not to be the painting of Monet. For the 
present, no doubt, Monet is the last word in paint- 
ing. To belittle him is not only whimsical, but 
ridiculous. He has plainly worked a revolution in 
his art. He has taken it out of the vicious ch'cle of 
conformity to, departure from, and return to ab- 
stractions and the so-called ideal. No one hereafter 



EEALISTIC PAITq^TIITG 135 

who attempts the representation of nature — and for 
as far ahead as we can see with aDy confidence, the 
representation of nature, the pantheistic ideal if 
one chooses, will increasingly intrench itself as the 
painter's true aim — no one who seriously attempts 
to realize this aim of now universal appeal will be 
able to dispense with Monet's aid. He must per- 
force follow the lines laid down for him by this 
astonishing naturaHst. Any other course must re- 
sult in solecism, and if anything future is certain, 
it is certain that the future will be not only inhos- 
pitable to, but absolutely intolerant of, solecism. 
Henceforth the basis of things is bound to be sohd 
and not superficial, real and not fantastic. But — 
whether the future is to commit itself wholly to 
prose, or is to preserve in new conditions the es- 
sence of the poetry that, in one form or another, 
has persisted since plastic art began — for the super- 
structure to be erected on the sound basis of just 
values and true impressions it is justifiably easy to 
predict a greater interest and a more real dignity 
than any such preoccupation with the basis of 
technic as Monet's can possibly have. And though, 
even as one says it, one has the feeling that the fut- 
ure is pregnant with some genius who will out- 
Monet Monet, and that painting will in some now 
inconceivable way have to submit hereafter to a still 
more rigorous standard than it does at present — I 



136 FRENCH AET 

have heard the claims of binocular vision urged — at 
the same time the true "child of nature " may con- 
sole himself with the reflection that accuracy and 
competence are but the accidents, at most the ne- 
cessary phenomena, of what really and essentially 
constitutes fine art of any kind — namely, the ex- 
pression of a personal conception of what is not 
only true but beautiful as well. In France less than 
anywhere else is it likely that even such a powerful 
force as modern realism will long dominate the con- 
structive, the architectonic faculty, which is part of 
the very fibre of the French genius. The exposi- 
tion and illustration of a theory believed in with 
a fervency to be found only among a people with 
whom the intelHgence is the chief element and ob- 
ject of experiment and exercise, are a natural con- 
comitant of mental energy and activity. But no 
theory holds them long in bondage. At the least, 
it speedily gives place to another formulation of the 
mutinous freedom its very acceptance creates. And 
the conformity that each of them in succession im- 
poses on mediocrity is always varied and relieved 
by the frequent incarnations in masterful personali- 
ties of the natural national traits — of which, I think, 
the architectonic spirit is one of the most conspicu- 
ous. Painting will again become creative, construc- 
tive, personally expressive. Its basis having been 
established as scientifically impeccable, its super- 



EEALISTIC PAINTING 137 

structure will exhibit the taste, the elegance, the 
imaginative freedom, exhibited within the limits of 
a cultivated sense of propriety, that are an integral 
part of the French painter's patrimony. 



IV 
CLASSIC SCULPTUEE 



CLASSIC SCULPTURE 



Feench sculpture naturally follows very much the 
same course as French painting. Its beginnings, 
however, are Gothic, and the Kenaissance emanci- 
pated rather than created it. Italy, over which the 
Gothic wave passed with less disturbing effect than 
anywhere else, and where the Pisans were doing 
pure sculpture when everywhere farther north 
sculpture was mainly decorative and rigidly archi- 
tectural, had a potent influence. But the modern 
phases of French sculpture have a closer relation- 
ship with the Chartres Cathedral than modern 
French painting has with its earliest practice ; 
and Claux Sluters, the Burgundian Fleming who 
modelled the wonderful Moses Well and the tombs 
of Jean Sans Peur and PhilHppe le Hardi at Dijon, 
among his other anachronistic master-pieces, exerted 
considerably greater influence upon his successors 
than the Touraine school of painting and the 
Clouets did upon theirs. 

These works are a curious compromise between 



142 FRETTCH AET 

the Gothic and the modern spirits. Sinters was 
plainly a modern temperament working with Gothic 
material and amid Gothic ideas. In itself his sculp- 
ture is hardly decorative, as we apply the epithet 
to modern work. It is just off the line of rigidity, 
of insistence in every detail of its right and title to 
individuality apart from every other sculptured de- 
tail. The prophets in the niches of the beautiful 
Dijon Well, the monks under the arcades of the 
beautiful Burgundian tombs, have little relation 
with each other as elements of a decorative sculp- 
tural composition. They are in the same style, 
that is aU. Each of them is in interest quite inde- 
pendent of the other. Compared with one of the 
Pisans' pulpits they form a congeries rather than a 
composition. Compared with Goujon's "Fountain 
of the Innocents " their motive is not decorative at 
all. Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah asserts his individual- 
ity in a way the more sociable prophets of the Sis- 
tine Chapel would hesitate to do. They have a 
little the air of hermits — of artistic anchorites, one 
may say. 

They are Gothic, too, not only in being thus 
sculpturally undecorative and uncomposed, but in 
being beautifully subordinate to the architecture 
which it is their unmistakable ancillary function to 
decorate in the most delightful way imaginable — 
in being in a word architecturally decorative. The 



CLASSIC SCULPTURE 143 

marriage of the two arts is, Gothically, not on equal 
terms. It never occurred, of course, to the Gothic 
architect that it should be. His ensemble was always 
one of which the chief, the overwhelming, one may 
almost say the sole, interest is structural. He even 
imposed the condition that the sculpture which 
decorated his structure should be itself architectu- 
rally structural. One figure of the portals of Char- 
tres is almost as like another as one pillar of the in- 
terior is like its fellows ; for the reason — eminently 
satisfactory to the architect — that it discharges an 
identical function. 

Emancipation from this thraldom of the architect 
is Sluters's great distinction, however. He is mod- 
em in this sense, without going so far — without go- 
ing anything like so far — as the modem sculptor who 
divorces his work from that of the architect with 
whom he is called upon to combine to the end of an 
ensemble that shall be equally agreeable to the sense 
satisfied by form and that satisfied by structure. His 
figures, subordinate as they are to the general archi- 
tectural purpose and function of what they decorate, 
are not only not purely structural in their expres- 
sion, stiff as they still are from the point of view of 
absolutely free sculpture ; they are, moreover, not 
merely unrelated to each other in any essential sense, 
such as that in which the figures of the Pisans and 
of Goujon are related ; they are on the contrary 



144 FRETTCH ART 

each and all wonderfully accentuated and individ- 
ualized. Every ecclesiastic on the Dijon tombs is 
a character study. Every figure on the Well has a 
psychologic as well as a sculptural interest. Poised 
between Gothic tradition and modern feeling, be- 
tween a reverend and august aesthetic convention- 
ality and the dawn of free activity, Sluters is one 
of the most interesting and stimulating figures in 
the whole history of sculpture. And the force of 
his characterizations, the vividness of his concep- 
tions, and the combined power and delicacy of his 
modelling give him the added importance of one of 
the heroes of his art in any time or country. There 
is something extremely Flemish in his sense of per- 
sonality. A similar interest in humanity as such, in 
the individual apart from the type, is noticeable in 
the pictures of the Van Eycks, of Memling, of Quen- 
tin Matsys, and Eoger Van der Weyden, wherein all 
idea of beauty, of composition, of universal appeal 
is subordinated as it is in no other art — in that of 
Holland no more than in that of Italy — to the rep- 
resentation in the most definite, precise, and power- 
ful way of some intensely human personality. There 
is the same extraordinary concreteness in one of 
Matsys's apostles and one of Sluters's prophets. 

Michel Colombe, the pupil of Claux and Anthoniet 
and the sculptor of the monument of Franyois 11.^ 
Duke of Brittany, at Nantes, the relief of "St. George 



CLASSIC SCULPTUEE 145 

and the Dragon " for the Chateau of Gaillon, now in 
the Louvre, and the Fontaine de Beaune, at Tours, 
and Jean Juste, whose noble masterpiece, the Tomb 
of Louis XTT. and Anne of Brittany, is the finest 
ornament of the Cathedral of St. Denis, bridge the 
distance and mark the transition to Goujon, Cousin, 
and Germain Pilon far more suavely than the school 
of Fontainebleau did the change from that of Tours 
to Poussin. Cousin, though the monument of Ad- 
miral Chabot is a truly marvellous work, witness- 
ing a practical sculptor's hand, is really to be classed 
among painters. And Germain Pilon's compro- 
mise with Italian decorativeness, graceful and fer- 
tile sculptor as his many works show him to have 
been, resulted in a lack of personal force that has 
caused him to be thought on the one hand " serious- 
ly injured by the bastard sentiment proper to the 
school of Fontainebleau," as Mrs. Pattison some- 
what sternly remarks, and on the other to be rep- 
rehended by Germain Brice in 1718, for evincing 
quelque reste du goilt gothique — some reminiscence 
of Gothic taste. Jean Goujon is really the first 
modern French sculptor. 



146 FRENCH AET 



He remains, too, one of the very finest, even in a 
competition constantly growing more exacting since 
his day. He had a very particular talent, and it was 
exhibited in manifold ways. He is as fine in relief 
as in the round. His decorative quality is as emi- 
nent as his purely sculptural side. Compared with 
his Italian contemporaries he is at once full of feel- 
ing and severe. He has nothing of Pilon's chame- 
leon-like imitativeness. He does not, on the other 
hand, break with the traditions of the best models 
known to him — and, undoubtedly he knew the best. 
His works cover and line the Louvre, and anyone 
who visits Paris may get a perfect conception of 
his genius — certainly anyone who in addition visits 
Rouen and beholds the lovely tracery of his earli- 
est sculpture on the portal of St. Maclou. He was 
eminently the sculptor of an educated class, and ap- 
pealed to a cultivated appreciation. Coming as he 
did at the acme of the French Renaissance, when 
France was borrowing with intelligent selection 
whatever it considered valuable from Italy, he 
pleased the dilettanti. There is something distinctly 
"swell" in his work. He does not perhaps express 
any overmastering personal feeling, nor does he 
stamp the impress of French national character on 



CLASSIC SCULPTUEE 147 

his work with any particular emphasis. He is too 
well-bred and too cultivated, he has too much 
aplomb. But his works show both more personal 
feeling and more national character than the works 
of his contemporaries elsewhere. For line he has a 
very intimate instinct, and of mass, in the sculptors 
as well as the painter's sense, he has a native com- 
prehension. Compare his "Diana" of the Louvre 
with CelHni' s in the adjoining room from the point 
of view of pure sculpture. Goujon's group is superb 
in every way. Cellini's figure is tormented and dis- 
torted by an impulse of decadent though decorative 
sestheticism. Goujon's caryatides and figures of the 
Innocents Fountain are equally sculptural in their 
way — by no means arabesques, as is so much of 
Eenaissance relief, and the modern relief that im- 
itates it. Everything lq fine that Goujon did is 
unified with the rest of his work and identifiable by 
the mark of style. 

m 

What do we mean by style? Something, at all 
events, very different from manner, in spite of Mr. 
Hamerton's insistence upon the contrary. Is the 
quality in virtue of which — as Mr. Dobson para- 
phrases Gautier — 

" The bust outlives the throne, 
The coin Tiberius " 



148 FRENCH ART 

the specific personality of the artist who carved 
the bust or chiselled the coin that have thus out- 
lived all personality connected with them? Not 
that personality is not of the essence of enduring 
art. It iSj on the contrary, the condition of any 
vital art whatever. But what gives the object, once 
personally conceived and expressed, its currency, its 
universality, its eternal interest — speaking to stran- 
gers with familiar vividness, and to posterity as to 
contemporaries — is something aside from its per- 
sonal feeling. And it is this something and not 
specific personality that style is. Style is the in- 
visible wind through whose influence "the lion on 
the flag " of the Persian poet " moves and marches." 
The lion of personality may be painted never so 
deftly, with never so much expression, individual 
feeling, picturesqueness, energy, charm ; it will not 
move and march save through the rhythmic, waving 
influence of style. 

Nor is style necessarily the grand style, as Arnold 
seems to imply, in calling it *'a peculiar recasting 
and heightening, under a certain condition of spir- 
itual excitement, of what a man has to say in such a 
manner as to add dignity and distinction to it." 
Perhaps the most explicit examples of pure style 
owe their production to spiritual coolness ; and, in 
any event, the word " peculiar " in a definition begs 
the question. Buffon is at once juster and more 



CLASSIC SCULPTURE 149 

definite in saying: "Style is nothing other than 
the order and movement which we put into our 
thoughts." It is singular that this simple and lucid 
utterance of Buffon should have been so little no- 
ticed by those who have written in English on style. 
In general English writers have apparently miscon- 
ceived, in very curious fashion, Buffon's other re- 
mark, " le style c'est I'homme ; " by which aphorism 
Buffon merely meant that a man's individual man- 
ner depends on his temperament, his character, and 
which he, of course, was very far from suspecting 
would ever be taken for a definition. 

Following Buffon's idea of " order and movement," 
we may say, perhaps, that style results from the 
preservation in every part of some sense of the form 
of the whole. It implies a sense of relations as well 
as of statement. It is not mere expression of a 
thought in a manner peculiar to the artist (in words, 
color, marble, what not), but it is such expression 
penetrated with both reminiscence and anticipa- 
tion. It is, indeed, on the contrary, very nearly the 
reverse of what we mean by expression, which is 
mainly a matter of personal energy. Style means 
correctness, precision, that feeling for the ensemble 
on which an inharmonious detail jars. Expression 
results from a sense of the value of the detail. If 
Walt Whitman, for example, were what his admir- 
ers' defective sense of style fancies him, he would be 



150 FRENCH ART 

expressive. If French academic art had as little ex- 
pression as its censors assert, it would still illustrate 
style — the quality which modifies the native and ap- 
posite form of the concrete individual thing with ref- 
erence to what has preceded and what is to follow 
it ; the quality, in a word, whose effort is to har- 
monize the object with its environment. When this 
environment is heightened, and universal instead of 
logical and particular, we have the " grand style ; " 
but we have the grand style generally in poetry, and 
to be sure of style at all prose — such prose as Gou- 
jon's, which in no wise emulates Michael Angelo's 
poetry — may justifiably neglect in some degree the 
specific personality that tends to make it poetic and 
individual 

IV 

Atter Goujon, Clodion is the great name in 
French sculpture, until we come to Houdon, who 
may almost be assigned to the nineteenth century. 
There were throughout the eighteenth century hon- 
orable artists, sculptors of distinction beyond con- 
test. But sculpture is such an abstract art itself 
that the sculpture which partook of the artificiality of 
the eighteenth century has less interest for us, less 
that is concrete and appealing than even the paint- 
ing of the epoch. It derived its canons and its prac- 
tice from Puget — the French Bernini, who with less 



CLASSIC SCULPTURE 151 

grace and less dilettante extravagance than his Italian 
exemplar had more force and solidity. With less 
cleverness, less charm — for Bernini, spite of the dis- 
esteem in which his juxtaposition to Michael Angelo 
and his apparent unconsciousness of the attitude 
such juxtaposition should have imposed upon him, 
cause him to be held, has a great deal of charm 
and is extraordinarily clever — he is more sincere, 
more thorough-going, more respectable. Coysevox 
is chiefly Puget exaggerated, and his pupil, Cou- 
stou, who comes down to nearly the middle of the 
eighteenth century, contributed nothing to French 
sculptural tradition. 

But Clodion is a distinct break. He is as differ- 
ent from Coysevox and Coustou as Watteau is from 
Lebrun. He is the essence of what we mean by 
Louis Quinze. His work is clever beyond charac- 
terization. It has in perfection what sculptors 
mean by color — that is to say a certain warmth of 
feeling, a certain insouciance, a brave carelessness 
for sculpturesque traditions, a free play of fancy, 
both in the conception and execution of his sub- 
jects. Like the Louis Quinze painters, he has his 
thoughtless, irresponsible, involuntary side, and like 
them — like the best of them, that is to say, like 
Watteau — he is never quite as good as he could be. 
He seems not so much concerned at expressing 
his ideal as at pleasing, and pleasing people of too 



152 FRENCH AKT 

frivolous an appreciation to call forth what is best 
in him. He devoted himself almost altogether to 
terra-cotta, which is equivalent to saying that the ex- 
quisite and not the impressive was his aim. Thor- 
oughly classic, so far as the avoidance of everything 
naturalistic is concerned, he is yet as little severe 
and correct as the painters of his day. - He spent 
nine years in Rome, but though enamoured in the 
most sympathetic degree of the antique, it was the 
statuettes and figurines, the gay and social, the ele- 
gant and decorative side of antique sculptui-e that 
exclusively he delighted in. His work is TanagTa 
Gallicized. It is not the group of ''The Deluge," 
or the "Entry of the French into Munich," or "Her- 
cules in Repose," for which he was esteemed by con- 
temporaries or is jDrized by posterity. He is admii*- 
able where he is inimitable — that is to say, in the 
delightful decoration of which he was so prodigal. 
It is not in his compositions essaying what is usual- 
ly meant by sculptural effect, but in his vases, clocks, 
pendants, volutes, little reliefs of nymphs riding 
dolphins over favoring breakers and amid hospitable 
foam, his toilettes of Venus, his fayade ornamenta- 
tions, his applied sculpture, in a word, that his time 
talent lies. After him it is natural that we should 
have a reversion to quasi-severity and imitation of 
the antique — ^just as David succeeded to the Louis 
Quinze pictorial riot — and that the French contem- 



CLASSIC SCULPTUEE 153 

poraries of Canova and Thorwaldsen, those literal, 
though enthusiastic illustrators of Winckelmann's 
theories, should be Pradier and Etex and the so-called 
Greek school. Pradier's Greek inspiration has some- 
thing Swiss about it, one may say — he was a Genevan 
— though his figures were simple and largely treated. 
He had a keen sense for the feminine element — the 
ewig Weibliche — and expressed it plastically with a 
zest approaching gusto. Yet his statues are women 
rather than statues, and, more than that, are hand- 
some rather than beautiful. Etex, it is to be feared, 
will be chiefly remembered as the unfortunately 
successful rival of Rude in the Arc de Triomphe de 
r^toile decoration. 



Having in each case more or less relation with, 
but really wholly outside of and superior to all 
"schools" whatever — except the school of nature, 
which permits as much freedom as it exacts fidelity 
— is the succession of the greatest of French sculp- 
tors since the Renaissance and down to the present 
day : Houdon, David d'Angers, Rude, Carpeaux, 
and Barye. Houdon is one of the finest examples of 
the union of vigor with grace. He will be known 
chiefly as a portraitist, but such a masterpiece as 
his "Diana" shows how admirable he was in the 
sphere of purely imaginative theme and treatment. 



154 FRENCH ART 

Classic, and even conventionally classic as it is, both 
in subject and in the way the subject is handled — 
compared for example with M. Falguiere's "Nymph 
Hunting," which is simply a realistic Diana — it is 
designed and modelled with as much personal free- 
dom and feeling as if Houdon had been stimulated 
by the ambition of novel accomplishment, instead 
of that of rendering with truth and grace a time- 
honored and traditional sculptural motive. Its 
treatment is beautifully educated and its effect 
refined, chaste, and elevated in an extraordinary 
degree. No master ever steered so near the reef of 
" clock-tops," one may say, and avoided it so surely 
and triumphantly. The figure is light as air and 
wholly effortless at the same time. There has 
rarely been such a distinguished success in circum- 
venting the great difficulty of sculpture — which is 
to rob marble or metal of its specific gravity and 
make it appear light and buoyant, just as the diffi- 
culty of the painter is to give weight and substance 
to his fictions. But Houdon's admirable busts of 
Moliere, Diderot, Washington, Franklin, and Mira- 
beau, his unequalled statue of Voltaire in the foyer 
of the Fran9ais and his San Bruno in Santa Maria 
degli Angeli at Kome are the works on which his 
fame will chiefly rest, and, owing to their masterly 
combination of strength with style, rest securely. 
To see the work of David d' Angers, one must go 



CLASSIC SCULPTUEE 155 

to Angers itself and to Pere-Lachaise. The Louvre 
is lamentably lacking in anything truly representa- 
tive of this most eminent of all portraitists in sculpt- 
ure, I think, not excepting even Houdon, if one 
may reckon the mass as well as the excellence of his 
remarkable production and the way in which it 
witnesses that portraiture is just what he was born 
to do. The " Philopoemen " of the Louvre is a fine 
work, even impressively large and simple. But it is 
the competent work of a member of a school and 
leaves one a little cold. Its academic quality quite 
overshadows whatever personal feeling one may by 
searching find in the severity of its treatment and 
the way in which a classic motive has been follov^red 
out naturally and genuinely instead of perfunctorily. 
It gives no intimation of the faculty that produced 
the splendid gallery of medallions accentuated by 
an occasional bust and statue, of David's celebrated 
contemporaries and quasi-contemporaries in every 
£eld of distinction. It is impossible to overestimate 
the interest and value, the truth and the art of these. 
Whether the subject be intractable or not seems to 
have made no difference to David. He invariably 
produced a work of art at the same time that he ex- 
pressed the character of its motive with uncompro- 
mising fidelity. His portraits, moreover, are pure 
sculpture. There is nothing of the cameo-cutter's 
art about them. They are modelled not carved. 



156 FRENCH ART 

The outline is no more important than it is in nat- 
ure, so far as it is employed to the end of identifi- 
cation. It is used decoratively. There are surpris- 
ing effects of fore-shortening, exhibiting superb, 
and as it were unconscious ease in handling relief 
— that most difficult of illusions in respect of having 
no law (at least no law that it is worth the sculp- 
tor's while to try to discover) of correspondence to 
reahty. Forms and masses have a definition and a 
firmness wholly remarkable in theu- independence 
of the usual low relief's reliance on pictorial and 
purely linear design. They do not blend pictur- 
esquely with the background, and do not depend 
on their suggestiveness for their character. They 
are always realized, executed — sculpture in a word 
whose suggestiveness, quite as potent as that of 
feebler executants, begins only when actual repre- 
sentation has been triumphantly achieved instead of 
impotently and skilfully avoided. 

Of Eude's genius one's first thought is of its 
robustness, its originality. Everything he did is 
stamped with the impress of his personality. At the 
same time it is equally evident that Rude's own tem- 
perament took its color from the transitional epoch 
in which he lived, and of which he was par excellence 
the sculptor. He was the true inheritor of his Bur- 
gundian traditions. His strongest side was that 
which allies him with his artistic ancestor, Claux 



CLASSIC SCULPTUEE 157 

Sluters. But he lived in an era of general culture 
and sestheticism, and all his naturalistic tendencies 
were complicated with theory. He accepted the 
antique not merely as a stimulus, but as a model. 
He was not only a sculptor but a teacher, and the 
formulation of his didacticism complicated consid- 
erably the free exercise of his expression. At the 
last, as is perhaps natural, he reverted to precedent 
and formulary, and in his "Hebe and the Eagle of 
Jupiter" and his "L' Amour Dominateur du Monde," 
is more at variance than anywhere else with his na- 
tive instinct, which was, to cite the admirable phrase 
of M. de Fourcaud, exterioriser nos idees et nos dmes. 
But throughout his life he halted a httle between 
two opinions — the current admiration of the classic, 
and his own instinctive feeHng for nature unsystem- 
atized and unsophisticated. His " Jeanne d'Arc " is 
an instance. In spite of the violation of tradition, 
which at the time it was thought to be, it seems to- 
day to our eyes to err on the side of the conven- 
tional. It is surely intellectual, classic, even facti- 
tious in conception as well as in execution. In 
some of its accessories it is even modish. It illus- 
trates not merely the abstract turn of conceiving a 
subject which Eude always shared with the great 
classicists of his art, but also the arbitrariness of 
treatment against which he always protested. With- 
out at all knowing it, he was in a very intimate 



158 FRENCH ART 

sense an eclectic in many of his works. He be- 
lieved in forming a complete mental conception of 
every composition before even posing a model, as 
be used to tell his students, but in complicated 
compositions this was impossible, and he had small 
talent for artificial composition. Furthermore, he 
often distrusted — quite without reason, but after the 
fatal manner of the rustic — his own intuitions. 
But one mentions these qualifications of his genius 
and accomplishment only because both his genius 
and accomplishment are so distinguished as to 
make one wish they were more nearly perfect than 
they are. It is really idle to wish that Rude had 
neglected the philosophy of his art, with which he 
was so much occupied, and had devoted himself ex- 
clusively to treating sculptural subjects in the man- 
ner of a nineteenth century successor of Sluters and 
Anthoniet. He might have been a greater sculptor 
than he was, but he is sufficiently great as he is. If 
his "Mercury" is an essay in conventional sculpture, 
his " Petit Pccheur " is frank and free sculptural 
handling of natural material. His work at Lille and 
in Belgium, his reclining figure of Cavaignac in the 
cemetery of Montmartre, his noble figures of Gas- 
pard Monge at Beaune, of Marshal Bertrand, and of 
Ney, are all cast in the heroic mould, full of charac- 
ter, and in no wise dependent on speculative theory. 
Few sculptors have displayed anything like his vari- 



CLASSIC SCULPTUEE 159 

ety and range, wliich extends, for example, from the 
"Baptism of Christ" to a statue of ''Louis XTEI. 
enfant," and includes portraits, groups, composi- 
tions in relief, and heroic statues. In all his success- 
ful work one cannot fail to note the force and fire of 
the man's personality, and perhaps what one thinks 
of chiefly in connection with him is the misfortune 
which we owe to the vacillation of M. Thiers of hav- 
ing but one instead of four gToups by him on the 
piers of the Arc de Triomphe de I'Etoile. Carpeaux 
used to say that he never passed the " Chant du 
Depart" without taking off his hat. One can un- 
derstand his feeling. No one can have any appre- 
ciation of what sculpture is without perceiving that 
this magnificent group easily and serenely takes its 
rank among the masterpieces of sculpture of all 
time. It is, in the first place, the incarnation of an 
abstraction, the spirit of patriotism roused to the 
highest pitch of warlike intensity and self-sacrifice, 
and in the second this abstract motive is expressed 
in the most elaborate and comprehensive complete- 
ness — with a combined intricacy of detail and sin- 
gleness of effect which must be the despair of any 
but a master in sculpture. 



160 FRENCH ART 



VI 

Caepeaux perhaps never did anything that quite 
equals the masterpiece of his master Rude. But 
the essential quality of the " Chant du Depart " he 
assimilated so absolutely and so naturally that he 
made it in a way his own. He carried it farther, 
indeed. If he never rose to the grandeur of this 
superb group, and he certainly did not, he never- 
theless showed in every one of his works that he 
was possessed by its inspiration even more com- 
pletely than was Rude himself. His passion was 
the representation of life, the vital and vivifying 
force in its utmost exuberance, and in its every va- 
riety, so far as his experience could enable him to 
render it. He was infatuated with movement, with 
the attestation in form of nervous energy, of the 
quick translation of thought and emotion into inter- 
preting attitude. His figures are, beyond all oth- 
ers, so thoroughly alive as to seem conscious of the 
fact and joy of pure existence. They are animated, 
one may almost say inspired, with the delight of 
muscular activity, the sensation of exercising the 
functions with which nature endows them. And 
accompanying this supreme motive and effect is 
a delightful grace and winningness of which few 
sculptors have the secret, and which suggest more 



CLASSIC SCULPTUKE 161 

than any one else Clodion's decorative loveliness. 
An even greater charm of sprite-like, fairy attract- 
iveness, of caressing and bewitching fascination, a 
more penetrating and seductive engagingness plays 
about Carpeaux's "Flora," I think, than is character- 
istic even of Clodion's figures and reliefs. Carpeaux 
is at all events nearer to us, and if he has not the 
classic detachment of Clodion he substitutes for it 
a quality of closer attachment and more intimate 
appeal. He is at his best perhaps in the "Danse " 
of the Nouvel Opera fayade, v^herein his elfin-like 
grace and exuberant vitality animate a group care- 
fully, and even classically composed, exhibiting skill 
and restraint as well as movement and fancy. Pos- 
sibly his temperament gives itself too free a rein in 
the group of the Luxembourg Gardens, in which he 
has been accused by his own admirers of sacrificing 
taste to turbulence and securing expressiveness at 
the expense of saner and more truly sculptural aims. 
But fancy the Luxembourg Gardens without "The 
Four Quarters of the World supporting the Earth." 
Parisian censure of his exuberance is very apt to 
display a conventional standard of criticism in the 
critic rather than to substantiate its charge. 

Barye's place in the history of art is more nearly 
unique, perhaps, than that of any of the great artists. 
He was certainly one of the greatest of sculptors, and 
he had either the good luck or the mischance to do 



162 FEENCH ART 

his work in a field almost wholly unexploited before 
him. He has in his way no rivals, and in his way 
he is so admirable that the scope of his work does 
not even hint at his exclusion from rivalry with the 
very greatest of his predecessors. A perception of 
the truth of this apparent paradox is the nearest 
one may come, I think, to the secret of his excel- 
lence. No matter what you do, if you do it well 
enough, that is, with enough elevation, enough 
spiritual distinction, enough transmutation of the 
elementary necessity of technical perfection into 
true significance — you succeed. And this is not 
the sense in which motive in art is currently belit- 
tled. It is rather the suggestion of Mrs. Browning's 
lines : 

*' Better far 
Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means 
Than a sublime art frivolously." 

Nothing could be more misleading than to fancy 
Barye a kind of modern Cellini. Less than any 
sculptor of modern times is he a decorative artist. 
The small scale of his works is in great part due 
to his lack of opportunity to produce larger ones. 
Nowadays one does what one can, even the greatest 
artists ; and Barye had no Lorenzo de' Medici for a 
patron, but, instead, a frowning Institute, which 
confined him to such work as, in the main, he did 



CLASSIC SCULPTUEE 163 

He did it con amove, it need not be added, and thus 
lifted it at once out of the customary category of 
such work. His bronzes were never articles de 
Paris, and their excellence transcends the function 
of teaching our sculptors and amateurs the lesson 
that " household " is as dignified a province as mon- 
umental, art. His groups are not essentially " clock- 
tops," and the work of perhaps the greatest artist, 
in the Hne from Jean Goujon to Carpeaux can 
hardly be used to point the moral that '' clock-tops " 
ought to be good. Cellini's " Perseus " is really 
more of a " parlor ornament " than Barye's smallest 
figure. 

Why is he so obviously great as well as so ob- 
viously extraordinary ? one constantly asks himself 
in the presence of his bronzes. Perhaps because 
he expresses with such concreteness, such definite- 
ness and vigor a motive so purely an abstraction. 
The illustration in intimate elaboration of elemental 
force, strength, passion, seems to have been his aim, 
and in everyone of his wonderfully varied groups he 
attains it superbly — not giving the beholder a sym- 
bol of it merely ; in no degree depending upon as- 
sociation or convention, but exhibiting its very es- 
sence with a combined scientific explicitness and po- 
etic energy to which antique art alone, one may 
almost say, has furnished a parallel. For this, fauna 
served him as well as the human figure, though. 



164 FRENCH ART 

could he have studied man with the facility which 
the Jardin des Plantes afforded him of observing 
the lower animals, he might have used the medium 
of the human figure more frequently than he did. 
When he did, he was hardly less successful ; and 
the four splendid groups that decorate the Pavilions 
Denon and Richelieu of the Louvre are in the very 
front rank of the heroic sculpture of the modern 
worlds 



V 

ACADEMIC SCULPTURE 



ACADEMIC SCULPTURE 



From Barye to the Institute is a long way. Notli« 
ing could be more interhostile than his sculpture 
and that of the professors at the Ecole des Beaux- 
Arts. And in considering the French sculpture of 
the present day we may say that, aside from the 
great names already mentioned — Houdon, David 
d' Angers, Bude, Carpeaux, and Barye — and apart 
from the new movement represented by Bodin and 
Dalou, it is represented by the Institute, and that 
the Institute has reverted to the Italian inspiration. 
The influence of Canova and the example of Pradier 
and Etex were not lasting. Indeed, Greek sculpture 
has perished so completely that it sometimes seems 
to live only in its legend. With the modern French 
school, the academic school, it is quite supplanted 
by the sculpture of the Kenaissance. And this is 
not unreasonable. The Benaissance sculpture is 
modern ; its masters did finely and perfectly what 
since their time has been done imperfectly, but es- 
sentially its artistic spirit is the modem artistic 



168 FRENCH ART 

spirit, full of personality, full of expression, careless 
of the type. Nowadays we patronize a little the 
ideal You may hear very intelligent critics in 
Paris — who in Paris is not an intelligent critic ? — 
speak disparagingly of the Greek want of expres- 
sion ; of the lack of passion, of vivid interest, of 
significance in a word, in Greek sculpture of the 
Periclean epoch. The conception of absolute beau- 
ty having been discovered to be an abstraction, the 
tradition of the purely ideal has gone with it. The 
caryatids of the Erechtheum, the horsemen of the 
Parthenon frieze, the reliefs of the Nike Apteros bal- 
ustrade are admired certainly ; but they are hard- 
ly sympathetically admired ; there is a tendency to 
relegate them to the limbo of subjects for aesthetic 
lectures. And yet no one can have carefully exam- 
ined the brilliant productions of modern French 
sculpture without being struck by this apparent 
paradox : that, whereas all its canons are drawn 
from a study of the Renaissance, its chief character- 
istic is, at bottom, a lack of expression, a carefulness 
for the type. The explanation is this : in the course 
of time, which " at last makes all things even," the 
individuality, the romanticism of the Eenaissance 
has itself become the type, is now itself become 
" classical," and the modern attitude toward it, how- 
ever sympathetic compared with the modern attitude 
toward the antique, is to a noteworthy degree facti- 



ACADEMIC SCULPTURE 169 

tious and artificial. And in art everything depends 
upon the attitude of mind. It is this which pre- 
vents Ingres from being truly Eaphaelesque, and 
Pradier from being really classical. If, therefore, 
it can justly be said of modern French sculpture 
that its sympathy for the Eenaissance sculpture ob- 
scures its vision of the ideal, it is clearly to be 
charged with the same absence of individual sig- 
nificance with which its thick - and - thin partisans 
reproach the antique. The circumstance that, like 
the Eenaissance sculpture, it deals far more largely 
in pictorial expression than the antique does, is, if 
it deals in them after the Eenaissance fashion and 
not after a fashion of its own, quite beside the essen- 
tial fact. There is really nothing in common between 
an academic French sculptor of the present day and 
an Italian sculptor of the fifteenth century, except 
the possession of what is called the modern spirit. 
But the modern spirit manifests itself in an enor- 
mous gamut, and the differences of its manifesta- 
tions are as great in their way, and so far as our 
interest in them is concerned, as the difference be- 
tween their inspiration and the mediaeval or the an- 
tique inspiration. 



170 FRENCH ART 



Chapu, who died a year or two ago, is perhaps 
the only eminent sculptor of the time whose inspira- 
tion is clearly the antique, and when I add that his 
work appears to me for this reason none the less 
original, it will be immediately perceived that I 
share imperfectly the French objection to the an- 
tique. Indeed, nowadays to have the antique in- 
spiration is to be original ex vi termini ; nothing is 
farther removed from contemporary conventions. 
But this is true in a much more integral sense. 
The pre-eminent fact of Greek sculpture, for ex- 
ample, is, from one point of view, the directness 
with which it concerns itself with the ideal^the 
slight temporary or personal element with which it 
is alloyed. When one calls an artist or a work 
Greek, this is what is really meant ; it is the sense 
in which Kaphael is Greek. Chapu is Greek in this 
way, and thus individualized among his contem- 
poraries, not only by having a different inspiration 
from them, but by depending for his interest on no 
convention fixed or fleeting and on no indirect sup- 
port of accentuated personal characteristics. Per- 
haps the antiquary of a thousand years from now, 
to whom the traits which to us distinguish so clear- 
ly the work of certain sculptors who seem to have 



ACADEMIC SCULPTURE 171 

nothing in common will betray only their common 
inspiration, will be even less at a loss than ourselves 
to find traces of a common origin in such apparent- 
ly different works as Chapu's "Mercury" and his 
" Jeunesse " of the Kegnault monument. He will 
by no means confound these with the classical pro- 
ductions of M. Millet or M. CaveHer, we may be 
sure. And this, I repeat, because their purely Greek 
spirit, the subordination in their conception and ex- 
ecution of the personal element, the direct way in 
which the sculptor looks at the ideal, the type, not 
only distinguish them among contemporary works, 
which are so largely personal expressions, but give 
them an eminent individuality as well. Like the 
Greek sculpture, they are plainly the production of 
culture, which in restraining wilfulness, however 
happily inspired, and imposing measure and poise, 
nevertheless acutely stimulates and develops the 
faculties themselves. The skeptic who may very 
plausibly inquire the distinction between that vague 
entity, ''the ideal," and the personal idea of the ar- 
tist concerned with it, can be shown this distinction 
better than it can be expressed in words. He will ap- 
preciate it very readily, to return to Chapu, by con- 
trasting the " Jeanne d'Arc " at the Luxembourg Gal- 
lery with such different treatment of the same theme 
as M Bastien-Lepage's picture, now in the New 
York Metropolitan Museum, illustrates. Contrary 



172 FRENCH ART 

to his almost invariable practice of neglecting even 
design in favor of impersonal natural representation, 
Bastien-Lepage's " Jeanne d'Arc " is the creature 
of wilful originality, a sort of embodied protest 
against conventionalism in historical painting ; she 
is the illustration of a theory, she is this and 
that systematically and not spontaneously ; the pre- 
dominance of the painter's personality is plain in 
every detail of his creation. Chapu's " Maid " is the 
ideal, more or less perfectly expressed ; she is 
everybody's " Maid," more or less adequately em- 
bodied. The statue is the antipodes of the conven- 
tional much more so, even, to our modern sense, 
than that of Rude ; it suggests no competition with 
that at Versailles or the many other characterless 
conceptions that abound. It is full of expression 
— arrested just before it ceases to be suggestive ; of 
individuality restrained on the hither side of pecu- 
liarity. The "Maid" is hearing her "voices " as dis- 
tinctly as Bastien-Lepage's figure is, but the fact is 
not forced upon the sense, but is rather disclosed to 
the mind with great delicacy and the dignity becom- 
ing sculpture. No one could, of course, mistake 
this work for an antique — an error that might possi- 
bly be made, supposing the conditions favorable, in 
the case of Chapu's " Mercury ; " but it presents, 
nevertheless, an excellent illustration of a modem 
working naturally and freely in the antique spirit 



ACADEMIC SCULPTUEE 173 

It is as affecting, as full of direct appeal, as a mod- 
ern work essays to be ; but its appeal is to the sense 
of beauty, to the imagination, and its effect is 
wrought in virtue of its art and not of its real- 
ity. No, individuality is no more inconsistent with 
the antique spirit than it is with eccentricity, with 
the extravagances of personal expression. Is there 
more individuality in a thirteenth-century grotesque 
than in the "Faun " of the Capitol? For sculpture 
especially, art is eminently, as it has been termed, 
"the discipline of genius," and it is only after the 
sculptor's genius has submitted to the discipline of 
culture that it evinces an individuality which really 
counts, which is really thrown out in relief on the 
background of crude personality. And if there be 
no question of perfection, but only of the ai-tist's 
attitude, one has but to ask himself the real mean- 
ing of the epithet Shakspearian to be assured of the 
harmony between individuality and the most imper- 
sonal practice. 

Nevertheless, this attitude and this perfection, 
characteristic as they are of Chapu's work, have 
their peril. When the quickening impulse, of 
whose expression they are after all but conditions, 
fails, they suddenly appear so misplaced as to ren- 
der insignificant what would otherwise have seemed 
" respectable " enough work. Everywhere else of 
great distinction — even in the execution of so per- 



174 FRENCH ART 

functory a task as a commission for a figure of 
"Mechanical Art" in the Tribunal de Commerce — at 
the great Triennial Exposition of 1883 Chapu was 
simply insignificant. There was never a more strik- 
ing illustration of the necessity of constant renewal 
of inspiration, of the constant danger of lapse into 
the perfunctory and the hackneyed, which threatens 
an artist of precisely Chapu's qualities. Another of 
equal eminence escapes this peril ; there is not the 
same interdependence of form and " content " to be 
disturbed by failure in the latter ; or, better still, 
the merits of form are not so distinguished as to 
require imperatively a corresponding excellence of 
intention. In fact, it is because of the exceptional 
position that he occupies in deriving from the antique, 
instead of showing the academic devotion to Kenais- 
sance romanticism which characterizes the general 
movement of academic French sculpture, that in any 
consideration of this sculpture Chapu's work makes 
a more vivid impression than that of his contempo- 
raries, and thus naturally takes a foremost place. 

m 

M. Paul Dubois, for example, in the characteris- 
tics just alluded to, presents the greatest possible 
contrast to Chapu ; but he will never, we may be 
sure, give us a work that could be called insignifi- 



ACADEMIC SCULPTUEE 175 

cant. His work will always express himself, and 
liis is a personality of very positive idiosyncrasy. 
M. Dubois, indeed, is probably tlie strongest of the 
Academic group of French sculptors of the day. 
The tomb of General Lamoriciere at Nantes has re- 
mained until recently one of the very finest achieve- 
ments of sculpture in modern times. There is in 
effect nothing markedly superior in the Cathedral 
of St. Denis, which is a great deal to say — much 
more, indeed, than the glories of the Italian Re- 
naissance, which lead us out of mere momentum 
to forget the French, permit one to appreciate. In- 
deed, the sculpture of M. Dubois seems positively 
to have but one defect, a defect which from one 
point of view is certainly a quality, the defect of 
impeccability. It is at any rate impeccable ; to seek 
in it a blemish, or, within its own hmitations, a dis- 
tinct shortcoming, is to lose one's pains. As work- 
manship, and workmanship of the subtler kind, in 
which every detail of surface and structure is per- 
ceived to have been intelligently felt (though rarely 
enthusiastically rendered), it is not merely satisfac- 
tory, but visibly and beautifully perfect. But in 
the category in which M. Dubois is to be placed 
that is very little ; it is always delightful, but it is 
not especially complimentary to M. Dubois, to oc- 
cupy one's self with it. On the other hand, by im- 
peccability is certainly not here meant the mere 



176 FRENCH ART 

success of expressing what one has to express — the 
impeccability of Canova and his successors, for ex- 
ample. The difficulty is with M. Dubois's ideal, 
with what he so perfectly expresses. In the last 
analysis this is not his ideal more than ours. And 
this, indeed, is what makes his work so flawless in 
our eyes, so impeccable. It seems as if of what he 
attempts he attains the type itself ; everyone must 
recognize its justness. 

The reader will say at once here that I am cavil- 
ling at M. Dubois for what I praised in Chapu. 
Bat let us distinguish. The two artists belong to 
wholly different categories. Chapu's inspiration is 
the antique spirit. M. Dubois, is, like all academic 
French sculptors, except Chapu indeed, absolutely 
and integrally a romanticist, completely enamoured 
of the Renaissance. The two are so distinct as to 
be contradictory. The moment M. Dubois gives us 
the type in a "Florentine Minstrel," to the exclusion 
of the personal and the particular, he fails in imag- 
inativeness and falls back on the conventional. The 
type of a ''Florentine Minstrel" is infallibly a con- 
vention. M. Dubois, not being occupied directly 
with the ideal, is bound to carry his subject and its 
idiosyncrasies much farther than the observer could 
have foreseen. To rest content with expressing 
gracefully and powerfully the notion common to all 
connoisseurs is to fall short of what one justly ex* 



ACADEMIC SCULPTURE 177 

acts of the romantic artist. Indeed, in exchange 
for this one would accept very faulty work in this 
category with resignation. "Whatever we may say or 
think, however we may admire or approve, in roman- 
tic art the quality that charms, that fascinates, is 
not adequacy but unexpectedness. In addition to 
the understanding, the instinct demands satisfaction. 
The virtues of " Charity " and " Faith " and the ideas 
of " Military Courage " and " Meditation " could not 
be more adequately illustrated than by the figures 
which guard the solemn dignity of General Lamo- 
riciere's sleep. There is a certain force, a breadth 
of view in the general conception, something in 
the way in which the sculptor has taken his task, 
closely allied to real grandeur. The confident and 
even careless dependence upon the unaided value of 
its motive, making hardly any appeal to the fancy 
on the one hand, and seeking no poignant effect on 
the other, endues the work with the poise and pu- 
rity of effortless strength. It conveys to the mind a 
clear impression of manliness, of qualities morally 
refreshing. 

But such work educates us so inexorably, teaches 
us to be so exacting ! After enjoying it to its and 
our utmost, we demand still something else, some- 
thing more moving, more stirring, something more 
directly appealing to our impulse and instinct. 
Even in his free and charming httle " St. John Bap- 



178 FRElSrCH ART 

tist " of the Luxembourg, and his admirable bust of 
Baudry one feels like asking for more freedom still, 
for more " swing." Dubois certainly is the last ar- 
tist who needs to be on his guard against "letting 
himself go." Why is it that in varying so agree- 
ably Kenaissance themes — compare the " Military 
Courage" and Michael Angelo's "Pensiero," or the 
'' Charity " and the same group in Delia Quercia's 
fountain at Sienna — it is restraint, rather than audac- 
ity, that governs him ? Is it caution or perversity ? 
In a word, imaginativeness is what permanently in- 
terests and attaches, the imaginativeness to which in 
sculpture the ordinary conventions of form are mere 
conditions, and the ordinary conventions of idea 
mere material. One can hardly apply generalities 
of the kind to M. Dubois without saying too much, 
but it is nevertheless true that one may illustrate 
the grand style and yet fail of being intimately and 
acutely sympathetic ; and M. Dubois, to whose 
largeness of treatment and nobility of conception 
no one will deny something truly suggestive of the 
grand style, does thus fail. It is not that he does 
not possess charm, and charm in no mean propor- 
tion to his largeness and nobility, but for the ele- 
vation of these into the realm of magic, into the 
upper air of spontaneous spiritual activity, his imag- 
ination has, for the romantic imagination which it 
is, a trifle too much self-possession — too much san- 



ACADEMIC SCULPTURE 179 

ity, if one chooses. He has the ambitions, the fac- 
ulties, of a lyric poet, and he gives us too frequently 
recitative. 

IV 

It is agreeable in many ways to turn from the 

rounded and complete impeccability of M. Dubois 
to the fancy of M. Saint-Marceaux. More than any 
of his rivals, M. Saint-Marceaux possesses the charm 
of unexpectedness. He is not perhaps to be called 
an original genius, and his work will probably 
leave French sculpture very nearly where it found 
it. Indeed, one readily perceives that he is not 
free from the trammels of contemporary convention. 
But how easily he wears them, and if no "severe 
pains and birth- throes " accompany the evolution of 
his conceptions, how graceful these conceptions 
are ! They are perhaps of the Canova family ; the 
"Harlequin," for instance, which has had such a 
prodigious success, is essentially Milanese sculpt- 
ure ; essentially even the " Genius Guarding the 
Secret of the Tomb " is a fantastic rather than an 
original work. But how the manner, the treat- 
ment, triumphs over the Canova insipidity ! It is 
not only Milanese sculpture better done, the exe- 
cution beautifully sapient and truthful instead of 
cheaply imitative, the idea broadly enforced by the 
details instead of frittered away among them ; it is 



180 FRENCH ART 

Milanese sculpture essentially elevated and digni- 
fied. Loosely speaking, the mere article de verfu 
becomes a true work of art. And this transforma- 
tion, or rather this development of a germ of not 
too great intrinsic importance, is brought about in 
the work of Saint-Marceaux by the presence of an 
element utterly foreign to the Canova sculpture 
and its succession — the element of character. If to 
the clever workmanship of the Italians he merely 
opposed workmanship of a superior kind as well as 
quality — thoroughly artistic workmanship, that is 
to say — his sculpture would be far less interesting 
than it is. He does, indeed, noticeably do this ; 
there is a felicity entirely delightful, almost magical, 
in every detail of his work. But when one com- 
pares it with the sculpture of M. Dubois, it is not 
of this that one thinks so much as of a certain in- 
dividual character with which M. Saint-Marceaux 
always contrives to endue it. This is not always in 
its nature sculptural, it must be admitted, and it 
approaches perhaps too near the character of genre 
to have the enduring interest that purely sculpt- 
ural qualities possess. But it is always individual, 
piquant, and charming, and in it consists M. Saint- 
Marceaux's claim upon us as an artist. No one 
else, even given his powers of workmanship, that 
is to say as perfectly equipped as he, could have 
treated so thoroughly conventional a genre subject as 



ACADEMIC SCULPTUEE 181 

the "Harlequin" as he has treated it. The mask 
is certainly one of the stock properties of the sub- 
ject, but notice how it is used to confer upon the 
whole work a character of mysterious witchery. It 
is as a whole, if you choose, an article de Paris^ 
with the distinction of being seriously treated ; the 
modelling and the movement admirable as far as 
they go, but well within the bounds of that anatom- 
ically artistic expression which is the raison d'etre 
of sculpture and its choice of the human form as its 
material. But the character saves it from this cate- 
gory; what one may almost call its psychological 
interest redeems its superficial triviality. 

M. Saint-Marceaux is always successful in this 
way. One has only to look at the eyes of his figures 
to be convinced how subtle is his art of expressing 
character. Here he swings quite clear of all conven- 
tion and manifests his genius positively and direct- 
ly. The unfathomable secret of the tomb is in the 
spmtual expression of the guarding genius, and the 
elaborately complex movement concentrated upon 
the urn and directly inspired by the ephebes of 
the Sistine ceiling is a mere blind. The same is 
true of the portrait heads which within his range 
M. Saint Marceaux does better than almost any- 
one. M. Eenan's "Confessions" hardly convey as 
distinct a notion of character as his bust exhibited 
at the Triennial of 1883. Many of the sculptors' 



182 FEENCH AET 

anonymous heads, so to speak, are hardly less re- 
markable. Long after the sharp edge of one's in- 
terest in the striking pose of his " Harlequin " and 
the fine movement and bizarre features of his 
*' Genius " has worn away, their curious spiritual 
interest, the individual cachet of their character, 
will sustain them. And so integrally true is this 
of all the productions of M. Saint-Marceaux's talent, 
that it is quite as perceptible in works where it is 
not accentuated and emphasized as it is in those of 
which I have been speaking ; it is a quality that 
will bear refining, that is even better indeed in its 
more subtile manifestations. The figure of the 
Luxembourg Gallery, the young Dante reading 
Virgil, is an example ; a girl's head, the forehead 
swathed in a turban, first exhibited some years ago, 
is another. The charm of these is more penetrat- 
ing, though they are by no means either as popular 
or as "important" works as the "Genius of the 
Tomb " or the " Harlequin." In the time to come M. 
Saint-Marceaux will probably rely more and more 
on their quality of grave and yet alert distinction, 
and less on striking and eccentric variations of 
themes from Michael Angelo like the "Genius," and 
illustrations like the "Harlequin" of the artistic 
potentialities of the Canova sculpture. 

With considerably less force than M. Dubois and 
decidedly less piquancy than M. Saint-Marceaux, 



ACADEMIC SCULPTUEE 183 

M. Antonin Mercie lias perhaps greater refinement 
than either. His outline is a trifle softer, his sen- 
timent more gracious, more suave. His work is 
difficult to characterize satisfactorily, and the fact 
may of course proceed from its lack of force, as 
weU as from the well-understood difficulty of trans- 
lating into epithets anything so essentially elusive 
as suavity and grace of form. At one epoch in any 
examination of academic French sculpture that of 
M. Mercie seems the most interesting ; it is so free 
from exaggeration of any kind on the one hand, it 
realizes its idea so satisfactorily on the other, and 
this idea is so agreeable, so refined, and at the same 
time so dignified. The " David " is an early work 
now in the Luxembourg gallery, reproductions of 
which are very popular, and the reader may judge 
how well it justifies these remarks. Being an ear- 
ly work, one cannot perhaps insist on its origi- 
nality ; in France, a young sculptor must be origi- 
nal at his peril ; his education is so complete, he 
must have known and studied the beauties of classic 
sculpture so thoroughly, that not to be impressed 
by them so profoundly as to display his apprecia- 
tiveness in his first work is apt to argue a certain 
insensitiveness. And every one cannot have crea- 
tive genius. What a number of admirable works 
we should be compelled to forego if creative genius 
were demanded of an artist of the present day 



184 FRENCH AET 

when the best minds of the time are occupied with 
other things than art ! One is apt to forget that in 
our day the minds that correspond with the artistic 
miracles of the Kenaissance are absorbed in quite 
different departments of effort. M. Mercie's " Da- 
vid" would perhaps never have existed but for 
Donatello's. As far as plastic motive is concerned, 
it may without injustice be called a variant of that 
admirable creation, and from every point of view 
except that of dramatic grace it is markedly inferior 
to its inspiration ; as an embodiment of triumphant 
youth, of the divine ease with which mere force is 
overcome, it has only a superficial resemblance to 
the original. 

But if with M. Mercie "David" was simply a 
classic theme to be treated, which is exactly what 
it of course was not with Donatello, it is unde- 
niable that he has expressed himself very dis- 
tinctly in his treatment. A less sensitive artist 
would have vulgarized instead of merely varying 
the conception, whereas one can easily see in M. 
Mercie's handling of it the ease, science, and felici- 
tous movement that have since expressed them- 
selves more markedly, more positively, but hardly 
more unmistakably, in the sculptor's maturer works. 
Of these the chief is perhaps the " Gloria Vic- 
tis," which now decorates the Square Montholon ; 
and its identity of authorship with the "David" is 



ACADEMIC SCULPTUEE IbO 

apparent in spite of its structural complexity and 
its far greater importance both in subject and ex- 
ecution. Its subject is the most inspiring that 
a French sculptor since the events of 1870-71 (so 
lightly considered by those who only see the the- 
atric side of French character) could treat. Its 
general interest, too, is hardly inferior ; there is 
something generally ennobling in the celebration 
of the virtues of the brave defeated that surpasses 
the commonplace of pseans. M. Mercie was, in 
this sense, more fortunate than the sculptor to 
whom the Berhnese owe the bronze commemoration 
of their victory. Perhaps to call his treatment en- 
tirely worthy of the theme, is to forget the import 
of such works as the tombs of the Medici Chapel at 
Florence. There is a region into whose precincts 
the dramatic quality penetrates only to play an in- 
sufficient part. But in modern art to do more than 
merely to keep such truths in mind, to insist on 
satisfactory plastic illustrations of them, is not only 
to prepare disappointment for one's self, but to risk 
misjudging admirable and elevated effort ; and to 
regret the fact that France had only M. Mercie and 
not IMichael Angelo to celebrate her ''Gloria Yictis" 
is to commit both of these errors. After all, the 
subjects are different, and the events of 1870-71 
had compensations for France which the downfall 
of Florentine liberty was without ; so that, indeed. 



186 FRENCH AET 

a note of unmixed melancholy, however lofty its 
strain, would have been a discord which M. Mercie 
has certainly avoided. He has avoided it in rather 
a marked way, it is true. His monument is dra- 
matic and stirring rather than inwardly moving. 
It is rhetorical rather than truly poetic ; and the 
admirable quality of its rhetoric, its complete free- 
dom from vulgar or sentimental alloy — its immense 
superiority to Anglo-Saxon rhetoric, in fine — does 
not conceal the truth that it is rhetoric, that it is 
prose and not poetry after all. Mercie's " Gloria 
Victis " is very fine ; I know nothing so fine in mod- 
ern sculpture outside of France. But then there is 
not very much that is fine at all in modern sculpt- 
ure outside of France ; and modern French sculpt- 
ure, and M. Mercie along with it as one of its most 
eminent ornaments, have made it impossible to 
speak of them in a relative way. The antique and 
the Eenaissance sculpture alone furnish their fit 
association, and like the Eenaissance and the an- 
tique sculpture they demand a positive and abso- 
lute, and not a comparative criticism. 



Well, then, speaking thus absolutely and posi- 
tively, the cardinal defect of the Institute sculpt- 
ure — and the refined and distinguished work of M. 



ACADEMIC SCULPTUEE 187 

Mercie better perhaps than almost any other assists 
us to see this — is its over - carefulness for style. 
This is indeed the explanation of what I mentioned 
at the outset as the chief characteristic of this 
sculpture, the academic inelasticity, namely, with 
which it essays to reproduce the Eenaissance ro- 
manticism. But for the fondness for style integral 
in the French mind and character, it would perceive 
the contradiction between this romanticism and any 
canons except such as are purely intuitive and inde- 
finable. In comparison with the Renaissance sculpt- 
ors, the French academic sculptors of the present 
day are certainly too exclusive devotees of Buffon's 
"order and movement," and too little occupied with 
the thought itself — too little individual. In com- 
parison with the antique, this is less apparent, but 
I fancy not less real. We are so accustomed to 
think of the antique as the pure and simple embodi- 
ment of style, as a sublimation, so to speak of the 
individual into style itself, that in this respect we 
are scarcely fair judges of the antique. In any case 
we know very little of it ; we can hardly speak of it 
except by periods. But it is plain that the Greek is 
so superior to any subsequent sculpture in this one 
respect of style that we rarely think of its other 
qualities. Our judgment is inevitably a compara- 
tive one, and inevitably a comparative judgment 
jfixes our attention on the Greek supremacy of style. 



188 FRENCH ART 

Indeed, in looking at the antique the thought itself 
is often alien to us, and the order and movement, 
being more nearly universal perhaps, are all that 
occupy us. A family tombstone lying in the ceme- 
tery at Athens, and half buried in the dust which 
blows from the PircTUS roadway, has more style 
than M. Mercie's " Quand-Meme " group for Belfort, 
wliich has been the subject of innumerable en- 
comiums, and which has only style and no individ- 
uality whatever to commend it. And the Athenian 
tombstone was probably furnished to order by the 
marble-cutting artist of the period, corresponding 
to those whose signs one sees at the entrances of 
our own large cemeteries. Still we may be sure 
that the ordinary Athenian citizen who adjudged 
prizes between ^schylus and Sophocles, and to 
whom Pericles addressed the oration which only ex- 
ceptional culture nowadays thoroughly appreciates, 
found plenty of individuahty in the decoration of 
the Parthenon, and was perfectly conscious of the 
difference between Phidias and his pupils. Even 
now, if one takes the pains to think of it, the differ- 
ence between such works as the so-called " Genius " 
of the Vatican and the Athenian marbles, or between 
the Niobe group at Florence and the Venus torso 
at Naples, for example, seems markedly individual 
enough, though the element of style is still to our 
eyes the most prominent quality in each. Indeed.. 



ACADEMIC SCULPTUEE 189 

if one really reflects upon the subject, it will not 
seem exaggeration to say that to anyone who has 
studied both with any thoroughness it would be 
more difficult to individualize the mass of modern 
French sculpture than even that of the best Greek 
epoch — the epoch when style was most perfect, 
when its reign was, as it sometimes appears to us, 
most absolute. And if we consider the Renaissance 
sculpture, its complexity is so great, its individuality 
is so pronounced, that one is apt to lose sight of the 
important part which style really plays in it. In a 
work by Donatello we see first of all his thought ; 
in a Madonna of Mino's it is the idea that charms 
us ; the Delia E-obbia frieze at Pistoja is pure genre. 
But modern academic French sculpture feels the 
weight of De Musset's handicap — it is born too late 
into a world too old. French art in general feels 
this, I think, and painting suffers from it equally 
with sculpture. Culture, the Institute, oppress in- 
dividuality. But whereas Corot and Millet have tri- 
umphed over the Institute there are — there were, at 
least, till yesterday — hardly any Millets and Corots 
of sculpture whose triumph is as yet assured. The 
tendency, the weight of authority, the verdict of 
criticism, always conservative in France, are all the 
other way. At the Ecole des Beaux- Arts one learns, 
negatively, not to be ridiculous. This is a great 
deal ; it is more than can be learned anywhere else 



190 FRElSrCH ART 

nowadays — witness German, Italian, above all Eng- 
lish exhibitions. Positively one learns the impor- 
tance of style ; and if it were not for academic 
French sculpture, one would say that this was 
something the importance of which could not be 
exaggerated. But in academic French sculpture 
it is exaggerated, and, what is fatal, one learns to 
exaggerate it in the schools. The traditions of 
Houdon are noticeably forgotten. Not that Hou- 
don's art is not eminently characterized by style ; 
the " San Bruno " at Rome is in point of style an 
antique. But compare his " Voltaire " in the foyer 
of the Comedie Francaise with Chapu's "Berryer" 
of the Palais de Justice, to take one of the very 
finest portrait-statues of the present day. Chapu's 
statue is more than irreproachable, it is elevated 
and noble, it is in the grand style ; but it is plain 
that its impressiveness is due to the fact that the 
subject is conceived as the Orator in general and 
handled with almost a single eye to style. The 
personal interest that accentuates every detail of 
the " Voltaire " — the physiognomy, the pose, the 
right hand, are marvellously characteristic — simply 
is not sought for in Chapu's work. Of this quality 
there is more in Houdon's bust of Moliere, whom 
of course Houdon never saw, than in almost any 
production of the modern school. Chapu's works, 
and such exceptions as the heads of Baudry and 



ACADEMIC SCULPTUEE 191 

Renan already mentioned, apart, one perceives that 
the modern school has made too many statues of 
the Kepublique, too many "Ledas" and "Susan- 
nahs" and " Quand-Memes " and " Gloria Victis." 
And its penchant for Eenaissance canons only em- 
phasizes the absolute commonplace of many of 
these. 

On the other hand, if Houdon's felicitous har- 
mony of style and individual force are forgotten, 
there is hardly any recognized succession to the 
imaginative freedom, the verve, the triumphant 
personal fertility of Rude and Carpeaux. At least, 
such as there is has not preserved the dignity and 
in many instances scarcely the decorum of those 
splendid artists. Much of the sculpture which fig- 
ures at the. yearly Salons is, to be sure, the absolute 
negation of style ; its main characteristic is indeed 
eccentricity ; its main virtues, sincerity (which in 
art, of course, is only a very elementary virtue) and 
good modelling (which in sculpture is equally ele- 
mentary). Occasionally in the midst of this display 
of fantasticality there is a work of promise or even 
of positive interest. The observer who has not a 
weak side for the graceful conceits, invariably 
daintily presented and beautifully modelled, of M, 
Moreau-Yauthier for example, must be hard to 
please ; they are of the very essence of the article de 
Paris, and only abnormal primness can refuse to 



192 FRENCH ART 

recognize the truth that the article de Paris has its 
art side. M. Moreau-Vauthier is not perhaps a 
modern Cellini ; he has certainly never produced 
anything that could be classed with the "Perseus" 
of the Loggia de' Lanzi, or even with the Fontaine- 
bleau "Diana ;" but he does more than anyone else 
to keep alive the tradition of Florentine preciosity, 
and about everything he does there is something 
dehghtful. 

Still the fantastic has not made much headway in 
the Institute, and it is so foreign to the French 
genius, which never tolerates it after it has ceased 
to be novel, that it probably never will. It is a 
great tribute to French " catholicity of mind and 
largeness of temper" that Carpeaux's '*La Danse" 
remains in its position on the fayade of the Grand 
Opera. French sentiment regarding it was doubt- 
less accurately expressed by the fanatic who tried 
to ink it indelibly after it was first exposed. This 
vandal was right from his point of view — the point 
of view of style. Almost the one work of absolute 
spontaneity among the hundreds which without and 
within decorate M. Garnier's edifice, it is thus a 
distinct jar in the general harmony ; it distinctly 
mars the *' order and movement" of M. Garnier's 
thought, which is fundamentally o^^posed to spon- 
taneity. But imagine the devotion to style of a 
milieu in which a person who would throw ink on a 



ACADEMIC SCULPTURE 193 

confessedly fine work of art is actuated by an im- 
personal dislike of incongruity ! Dislike of the in- 
congruous is almost a French passion, and, like aU 
qualities, it has its defect, the defect of tolerating 
the conventional. It is through this tolerance, for 
example, that one of the freest of French critics of 
art, a true Voltairian, Stendhal, was led actually to 
find Guido's ideal of beauty higher than Kaphael's, 
and to miss entii'ely the grandeur of Tintoretto. 
Critical opinion in France has not changed radically 
since Stendhal's day. 



YE 



The French sculptor may draw his inspiration 
from the sources of originality itself, his audience 
will measure the result by conventions. It is this 
fact undoubtedly that is largely responsible for 
the over-carefulness for style already remarked. 
Hence the work of M. Aime-Millet and of Professors 
Guillaume and Cavelier, and the fact that they are 
professors. Hence also the election of M. Falgui- 
ere to succeed to the chair of the Beaux-Arts left 
vacant by the death of Jouffroy some years ago» 
All of these have done admirable work. Professor 
Guillaume's Gracchi group at the Luxembourg is 
alone enough to atone for a mass of productions of 
which the " Castalian Fount " of a recent Salon 



194 FRENCH ART 

is the cold and correct representative. Cavelier's 
" Gluck," destined for the Opera, is spirited, even 
if a trifle galvanic. Millet's " Apollo," which 
crowns the main gable of the Opera, stands out 
among its author's other works as a miracle of 
grace and rhythmic movement. M. Falguiere's ad- 
mirers, and they are numerous, will object to the 
association here made. Falguiere's range has al- 
ways been a wide one, and everything he has done 
has undoubtedly merited a generous portion of the 
prodigious encomiums it has invariably obtained. 
Yet, estimating it in any other way than by energy, 
variety, and mass, it is impossible to praise it highly 
with precision. It is too plainly the work of an 
artist who can do one thing as well as another, and 
of which cleverness is, after all, the spiritual stand- 
ard. Bartholdi, who also should not be forgotten in 
any sketch of French sculpture, would, I am sure, 
have acquitted himself more satisfactorily than Fal- 
guiere did in the colossal groups of the Trocadero 
and the Arc de Triomphe del'fitoile. To acquit 
himself satisfactorily is Bartholdi's specialty. These 
two groups are the largest and most important that 
a sculptor can have to do. The crowning of the 
Arc de Triomphe at least was a splendid opportu- 
nity. Neither of them had any distinction of out- 
line, of mass, of relation, or of idea. Both were con- 
ventional to the last degree. That on the Arc had 



ACADEMIC SCULPTUEE 195 

even its ludicrous details, such as occur only from 
artistic absent-mindedness in a work conceived and 
executed in a fatigued and hackneyed spirit. The 
" Saint Vincent de Paul " of the Pantheon, which 
justly passes for the sculptor's chef-d'ceuvrei^ in idea 
a work of large humanity. M. Falguiere is behind no 
one in abihty to conceive a subject of this kind with 
propriety, and his subject here is inspiring if ever a 
subject was. The " Petit Martyr " of the Luxem- 
bourg has a real charm, but it too is content with 
too little, as one finds out in seeing it often ; and it 
is in no sense a large work, scarcely larger than the 
tu-esomely popular '^ Running Boy " of the same 
museum, which nevertheless in its day marked an 
epoch in modelling. Indeed, so slight is the spirit- 
ual hold that M. Falguiere has on one, that it really 
seems as if he were at his best in such a frankly 
carnal production as his since variously modified 
" Nymph Hunting " of the Triennial Exposition of 
1883. The idea is nothing or next to nothing, but 
the surface /a^Ve is superb. 

M. Barrias, M. Delaplanche, and M. Le Feuvre 
have each of them quite as much spontaneity as M. 
Falguiere, though the work of neither is as impor- 
tant in mass and variety. M. Delaplanche is always 
satisfactory, and beyond this there is something 
large about what he does that confers dignity even 
in the absence of quick interest. His proportions 



196 FRENCH ART 

are simple, bis outline flowing, and the agreeable 
ease of his compositions makes up to a degree for 
any lack of sympathetic sentiment or impressive 
significance : witness his excellent " Maternal In- 
struction," of the little park in front of Sainte 
Clothilde. M. Le Feuvre's qualities are very nearly 
the reverse of these : he has a fondness for integrity 
quite hostile in his case to simplicity. In his very 
frank appeal to one's susceptibility he is a little 
careless of sculptural considerations, which he is 
prone to sacrifice to pictorial ends. The result is a 
mannerism that in the end ceases to impress, and 
even becomes disagreeable. As nearly as may be in 
a French sculptor it borders on sentimentality, and 
finally the swaying attitudes of his figures become 
limp, and the startled-fawn eyes of his maidens and 
youths appear less touching than lackadaisical. 
But his being himself too conscious of it should not 
obscure the fact that he has a way of his own. M. 
Barrias is an artist of considerably greater powers 
than either M. Le Feuvre or M. Delaplanche ; but 
one has a vague perception that his powers are lim- 
ited, and that to desire in his case what one so sin- 
cerely wishes in the case of M. Dubois, namely, that 
he would " let himself go," would be unwise. Hap- 
pily, when he is at his best there is no temptation 
to form such a wish. The " Premieres Funerailles " 
is a superb work — ''the chef-d'oeuvre of our modem 



ACADEMIC SCULPTURE 197 

sculpture," a French critic enthusiastically terms it. 
It is hardly that ; it has hardly enough spiritual 
distinction — not quite enough of either elegance or 
elevation — to merit such sweeping praise. But it 
may be justly termed, I think, the most completely 
representative of the masterpieces of that sculpture. 
Its triumph over the prodigious difficulties of elab- 
orate composition "in the round" — difficulties to 
which M. Barrias succumbed in the "Spartacus" of 
the Tuileries Gardens — and its success in subor- 
dinating the details of a group to the end of enforc- 
ing a single motive, preserving the while their in- 
dividual interest, are complete. Nothing superior 
in this respect has been done since John of Bo- 
logna's "Eape of the Sabines." 

YU 

M. EMMAmjEL Fkemtet occupies a place by him- 
self. There have been but two modern sculptors 
who have shown an equally pronounced genius for 
representing animals — namely, Barye, of course, and 
Barye's clever but not great pupil, Cain. The ti- 
gress in the Central Park, perhaps the best bronze 
there (the competition is not exacting), and the best 
also of the several variations of the theme of which, 
at one time, the sculptor apparently could not tire, 
familiarizes Americans with the talent of Cain. In 



198 FRENCH ART 

this association Eouillard, whose horse in the Tro- 
cadero Gardens is an animated and elegant work, 
ought to be mentioned, but it is hardly as good as 
the neighboring elephant of Fremiet as mere animal 
representation (the genre exists and has excellences 
and defects of its own), while in more purely artis- 
tic worth it is quite eclipsed by its rival. Still if 
fauna is interesting in and of itself, which no one 
who knows Barye's work would controvert, it is 
still more interesting when, to put it brutally, some- 
thing is done with it. In his ambitious and colossal 
work at the Trocadero, M. Fremiet does in fact use 
his fauna freely as artistic material, though at first 
sight it is its zoological interest that appears para- 
mount. The same is true of the elephant near by, 
in which it seems as if he had designedly attacked 
the difficult problem of rendering embodied awk- 
wardness decorative. Still more conspicuous, of 
course, is the artistic interest, the fancy, the humor, 
the sportive grace of his Luxembourg group of a 
young satyr feeding honey to a brace of bear's cubs, 
because he here concerns himself more directly with 
his idea and gives his genius freer play. And 
everyone will remember the sensation caused by his 
impressively repulsive " Gorilla Carrying off a 
Woman." But it is when he leaves this kind of 
thing entirely, and, wholly forgetful of his studies 
at the Jardin des Plantes, devotes himself to purely 



ACADEMIC SCULPTUKE 199 

monumental work, that he is at his best. And in 
saying this I do not at all mean to insist on the 
superiority of monumental sculpture to the sculpt- 
ure oi fauna ; it is superior, and Barye himself can- 
not make one content with the exclusive consecra- 
tion of admirable talent to picturesque anatomy 
illustrating distinctly unintellectual passions. M. 
Fremiet, in ecstasy over his picturesque anatomy at 
the Jardin des Plantes, would scout this ; but it is 
nevertheless true that in such works as the " Age 
de la pierre," which, if it may be called a monu- 
mental clock-top, is nevertheless certainly monu- 
mental ; his " Louis d'Orleans," in the quadrangle 
of the restored Chateau de Pierrefonds ; his 
'•'Jeanne d'Arc" (the later statue is not, I think, 
essentially different from the earlier one) ; and his 
"Torch-bearer" of the Middle Ages, in the new 
Hotel de Ville of Paris, not only is his subject a 
subject of loftier and more enduring interest than 
his elephants and deer and bears, but his own 
genius finds a more congenial medium of expres- 
sion. In other words, any one who has seen his 
"Torch-bearer" or his "Louis d'Orleans" must 
conclude that M. Fremiet is losing his time at the 
Jardin des Plantes. In monumental works of the 
sort he displays a commanding dignity that borders 
closely upon the grand style itself. The " Jeanne 
d'Arc " is indeed criticised for lack of style. The 



200 FRENCH AET 

horse is fine, as always with M. Fremiet ; the action 
of both horse and rider is noble, and the homoge- 
neity of the two, so to speak, is admirably achieved. 
But the character of the Maid is not perfectly satis- 
factory to a priori critics, to critics who have more 
or less hard and fast notions about the immiscibil- 
ity of the heroic and the familiar. The "Jeanne 
d'Arc " is of course a heroic statue, illustrating one 
of the most puissant of profane legends ; and it is 
unquestionably familiar and, if one chooses, defi- 
antly unpretentious. Perhaps the Maid as M. Fre- 
miet represents her could never have accomplished 
legend-producing deeds. Certainly she is the Maid 
neither of Chapu, nor of Bastien-Lepage, nor of 
the current convention. She is, rather, pretty, sym- 
pathetically childlike, mignonne ; but M. Fremiet's 
conception is an original and a gracious one, and 
even the critic addicted to formulae has only to for- 
get its title to become thoroughly in love with it ; 
beside this merit a priori shortcomings count very 
little. But the other two works just mentioned are 
open to no objection of this kind or of any other, 
and in the category to which they belong they are 
splendid works. Since Donatello and Verrocchio 
nothing of the kind has been done which surpasses 
them ; and it is only M. Fremiet's penchant for 
animal sculpture, and his fondness for exercising his 
lighter fancy in comparatively trivial objets de vertu. 



ACADEMIC SCULPTUEE 201 

that obscure in any degree his fine talent for illus- 
trating the grand style with natural ease and large 
simplicity. 

vm 

I HAVE already mentioned the most representa- 
tive among those who have " arrived " of the school 
of academic French sculpture as it exists to-day, 
though it would be easy to extend the hst with 
Antonin Carles, whose " Jeunesse " of the World's 
Fair of 1889 is a very graceful embodiment of 
adolescence ; Suchetet, whose " Byblis " of the 
same exhibition caused his early death to be de- 
plored ; Adrien Gaudez, Etcheto, Idrac, and, of 
course, many others of distinction. There is no 
looseness in characterizing this as a " school ; " it 
has its own quahties and its corresponding de- 
fects. It stands by itself — apart from the Greek 
sculpture and from its inspiration, the Eenaissance, 
and from the more recent traditions of Houdon, or 
of Eude and Carpeaux. It is a thoroughly legiti- 
mate and unaffected expression of national thought 
and feeling at the present time, at once splendid 
and simple. The moment of triumph in any intel- 
lectual movement is, however, always a dangerous 
one. A slack-water period of intellectual slothful- 
ness nearly always ensues. Ideas which have pre- 
viously been struggling to get a hearing have be- 



202 FEENCH ART 

come accepted ideas that have almost the force of 
axioms ; no one thinks of their justification, of their 
basis in real truth and fact ; they take their place in 
the great category of conventions. The mind feels 
no longer the exhilaration of discovery, the stimu- 
lus of fresh perception ; the sense becomes jaded, 
enthusiasm impossible. Dealing with the same ma- 
terial and guided by the same principles, its pro- 
duction becomes inevitably hackneyed, artificial, 
lifeless; the Zeit-Geist, the Time-Spirit, is really a 
kind of Sisyphus, and the essence of life is move- 
ment. This law of perpetual renewal, of the peri- 
odical quickening of the human spirit, explains the 
barrenness of the inheritance of the greatest men ; 
shows why originality is a necessary element of 
perfection ; why Phidias, Praxiteles, Donatello, 
Michael Angelo (not to go outside of our subject), 
had no successors. Once a thing is done it is done 
for all time, and the study of perfection itself avails 
only as a stimulus to perfection in other combina- 
tions. In fact, the more nearly perfect the model 
the greater the necessity for an absolute break with 
it in order to secure anything like an equivalent in 
living force ; in its direction at least everything vital 
has been done. So its lack of original force, its 
over-carefulness for style, its inevitable sensitiveness 
to the criticism that is based on convention, make 
the weak side of the French academic sculpture of 



ACADEMIC SCULPTUEE 203 

the present day, fine and triumphant as it is. That 
the national thought and feehng are not a little 
conventional, and have the academic rather than a 
spontaneous inspiration, has, however, lately been 
distinctly felt as a misfortune and a limitation by a 
few sculptors whose work may be called the begin- 
ning of a new movement out of which, whatever 
may be its own limitations, nothing but good can 
come to French sculpture and of which the protag- 
onists are Augusts Rodin and Jules Dalou. 



VI 

THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPT- 
URE 



THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPT- 
URE 



Side by side with the academic current in French 
art has moved of recent years a naturalist and ro- 
mantic impulse whose manifestations have been 
always vigorous though occasionally exaggerated. 
In any of the great departments of activity nation- 
ally pursued — as art has been pursued in France 
since Francis I. — there are always these rival cur- 
rents, of which now one and now the other con- 
stantly affects the ebb and flow of the tide of 
thought and feeling. The classic and romantic duel 
of 1830, the rise of the naturalist opposition to Hu- 
go and romanticism in our own day, are familiar 
instances of this phenomenon in literature. The re- 
volt of Gericault and Delacroix against David and 
Ingres are equally well known in the field of paint- 
ing. Of recent years the foundation of the peri- 
odical L'Art and its rivalry with the conservative 
Gazette des Beaux Arts mark with the same defi- 
niteness, and an articulate precision, the same con- 



208 FRENCH ART 

flict between truth, as new eyes see it, and tradition. 
Never, perhaps, since the early Renaissance, how- 
ever, has nature asserted her supremacy over con- 
vention in such unmistakable, such insistent, and, 
one may say, I think, such intolerant fashion as she 
is doing at the present moment. Sculpture, in vir- 
tue of the defiant palpability of its material, is the 
most impalpable of the plastic arts, and therefore 
it feels less quickly than the rest, perhaps, the im- 
press of the influences of the epoch and their clas- 
sifying canons. Natural imitation shows first in 
sculpture, and subsists in it longest. But conven- 
tion once its conqueror, the return to nature is here 
most tardy, because, owing to the impalpable, the 
elusive quality of sculpture, though natural stand- 
ards may everywhere else be in vogue, no one 
thinks of applying them to so specialized an expres- 
sion. Its variation depends therefore more com- 
pletely on the individual artist himself. Niccolo 
Pisano, for example, died when Giotto was two years 
old, but, at the other end of the historic line of 
modern art, it has taken years since Delacroix to 
furnish recognition for Auguste Rodin. The strong- 
hold of the Institute had been mined many times 
by revolutionary painters before Dalou took the 
grand medal of the Salon. 

Owing to the relative and in fact polemic position 
which these two artists occupy, the movement which 



THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTURE 209 

they represent, and of wliich as yet they themselves 
form a chief part, a little obscures their respective 
personalities, which are nevertheless, in sculpture, 
by far the most positive and puissant of the present 
epoch. M. Eodin's work, especially, is so novel that 
one's first impression in its presence is of its im- 
plied criticism of the Institute. One thinks first of 
its attitude, its point of view, its end, aim, and 
means, and of the utter contrast of these with those 
of the accepted contemporary masters in his art — 
of Dubois and Chapu, Mercie and Saint-Marceaux. 
One judges generally, and instinctively avoids per- 
sonal and direct impressions. The first thought is 
not, Are the "Saint Jean" and the "Bourgeois de 
Calais " successful works of art ? But, Gan they 
be successful if the accepted masterpieces of mod- 
em sculpture are not to be set down as insipid? 
One is a little bewildered. It is easy to see and to 
estimate the admirable traits and the shortcomings 
of M. Dubois's delightful and impressive reminis- 
cences of the Eenaissance, of M. Mercie's refined 
and graceful compositions. They are of their time 
and place. They embody, in distinguished man- 
ner and in an accentuated degree, the general 
inspiration. Their spiritual characteristics are tra- 
ditional and universal, and technically, vdthout per- 
haps often passing beyond it, they exhaust clever- 
ness. You may enjoy or resent their classic and 



210 FRENCH ART 

exemplary excellences, as you feel your taste to 
have suffered from the lack or the superabund- 
ance of academic influences ; I cannot fancy an 
American insensitive to their charm. But it is 
plain that their perfection is a very different thing 
from the characteristics of a strenuous artistic per- 
sonality seeking expression. If these latter when 
encountered are seen to be evidently of an extreme- 
ly high order, contemporary criticism, at all events, 
should feel at once the wisdom of beginning with 
the endeavor to appreciate, instead of making the 
degree of its own famiUarity with them the test of 
their merit. 

French aesthetic authority, which did this in 
the instances of Barye, of Delacroix, of Millet, of 
Manet, of Puvis de Chavannes, did it also for many 
years in the instance of M. Rodin. It owes its de- 
feat in the contest with him — for like the recalci- 
trants in the other contests, M Rodin has definitive- 
ly triumphed — to the unwise attempt to define him 
in terms heretofore applicable enough to sculptors, 
but wholly inapplicable to him. It failed to see 
that the thing to define in his work was the man 
himself, his temperament, his genius. Taken by 
themselves and considered as characteristics of the 
Institute sculptors, the obvious traits of this work 
might, that is to say, be adjudged eccentric and 
empty. Fancy Professor Guillaume suddenly sub- 



THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTURE 211 

ordinating academic disposition of line and mass to 
true structural expression ! One would simply feel 
the loss of Ms accustomed style and harmony. 
With M. Kodin, who deals with nature directly, 
through the immediate force of his own powerful 
temperament, to feel the absence of the Institute 
training and traditions is absurd. The question in 
his case is simply whether or no he is a great artis- 
tic personality, an extraordinary and powerful tem- 
perament, or whether he is merely a turbulent and 
capricious protestant against the measure and taste 
of the Institute. But this is really no longer a 
question, however it may have been a few years 
ago ; and when his Dante portal for the new Palais 
des Arts Decoratif s shall have been finished, and the 
public had an opportunity to see what the sculptor's 
friend and only serious rival, M. Dalou, calls " one 
of the most, if not the most original and astonish- 
ing pieces of sculpture of the nineteenth century," it 
will be recognized that M. Rodin, so far from being 
amenable to the current canon, has brought the can- 
on itself to judgment. 

How and why, people will perceive in proportion 
to their receptivity. Candor and intelligence will 
suf&ce to appreciate that the secret of M. Eodin's 
art is structural expression, and that it is this and 
not any superficial eccentricity of execution that 
definitely distinguishes him from the Institute. 



212 FRENCH AET 

Just as his imagination, liis temperament, his spir- 
itual energy and ardor individualize the positive 
originality of his motive, so the expressiveness of his 
treatment sets him aside from all as well as from 
each of the Institute sculptors in what may be 
broadly called technical attitude. No sculptor has 
ever carried expression further. The sculpture of the 
present day has certainly not occupied itself much 
with it. The Institute is perhaps a little afraid of 
it. It abhors the baroque rightly enough, but very 
likely it fails to see that the expression of such 
sculpture as M. Eodin's no more resembles the con- 
tortions of the Dresden Museum giants than it does 
the composure of M. Delaplanche. The baroque is 
only violent instead of placid commonplace, and is 
as conventional as any professor of sculpture could 
desire. Expression means individual character com- 
pletely exhibited rather than conventionally sug- 
gested. It is certainly not too much to say that in 
the sculpture of the present day the sense of indi- 
vidual character is conveyed mainly by convention. 
The physiognomy has usurped the place of the 
physique, the gesture of the form, the pose of the 
substance. And face, gesture, form are, when they 
are not brutally naturalistic and so not art at all, not 
individual and native, but typical and classic. Very 
much of the best modern sculpture might really 
have been treated like those antique figurines of 



THE I^EW MOVEMEITT IN SCULPTTJEE 213 

which the bodies were made by wholesale, being 
supplied with individual heads when the time came 
for using them. 

This has been measurably true since the disap- 
pearance of the classic dress and the concealment 
of the body by modern costume. The nudes of the 
early Renaissance, in painting still more than in 
sculpture, are differentiated by the faces. The rest 
of the figure is generally conventionaHzed as thor- 
oughly as the face itself is in Byzantine and the 
hands in Giottesque painting. Giotto could draw 
admirably, it need not be said. He did draw as 
well as the contemporary feeling for the human fig- 
ure demanded. When the Eenaissance reached its 
cHmax and the study of the antique led artists to 
look beneath drapery and interest themselves in the 
form, expression made an immense step forward. 
Color was indeed almost lost sight of in the new 
interest, not to reappear till the Venetians. But 
owing to the lack of visible nudity, to the lack of the 
classic gymnasia, to the concealments of modern at- 
tire, the knowledge of and interest in the form re- 
mained, within certain Hmits, an esoteric affair. The 
general feeling, even where, as in the Italy of the 
quattro and cinque centi, everyone was a connoisseur, 
did not hold the artist to expression in his anatomy 
as the general Greek feeHng did. Everyone was a 
connoisseur of art alone, not of nature as well. 



214 FRENCH ART 

Consequently, in spite of such an enthusiastic 
genius as Donatello, who probably more than any 
other modern has most nearly approached the 
Greeks — not in spiritual attitude, for he was emi- 
nently of his time, but in his attitude toward nature 
— the human form in art has for the most part re- 
mained, not conventionalized as in the Byzantine 
and Gothic times, but thoroughly conventional. 
Michael Angelo himself certainly may be charged 
with lending the immense weight of his majestic 
genius to perpetuate the conventional. It is not his 
distortion of nature, as pre-Raphaelite limitedness 
glibly asserts, but his carelessness of her prodigious 
potentialities, that marks one side of his colossal ac- 
complishment. Just as the lover of architecture as 
architecture will protest that IVIichael Angelo's was 
meretricious, however inspiring, so M. Bod in de- 
clares his sculpture unsatisfactory, however poetic- 
ally impressive. " He used to do a little anatomy 
evenings," he said to me, "and used his chisel next 
day without a model. He repeats endlessly his one 
type — the youth of the Sistine ceiling. Any par- 
ticular felicity of expression you are apt to find him 
borrowing from Donatello — such as, for instance, 
the movement of the arm of the * David,' which is 
borrowed from Donatello's ' St. John Baptist.' " 
Most people to whom Michael Angelo's creations 
appear celestial in their majesty at once and in their 



THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTURE 215 

winningness would deny this. But it is worth cit- 
ing both because M. Eodin strikes so many crude 
apprehensions as a French Michael Angelo, where- 
as he is so radically removed from him in point of 
view and in practice that the unquestionable spir- 
itual analogy between them is rather like that be- 
tween kindred spirits working in different arts, and 
because, also, it shows not only what M. Eodin is 
not, but what he is. The grandiose does not run 
away with him. His imagination is occupied largely 
in following out nature's suggestions. His senti- 
ment does not so drench and saturate his work as 
to float it bodily out of the realm of natural into 
that of supernal beauty, there to crystallize in deco- 
rative and puissant visions appearing out of the void 
and only superficially related to their correspond- 
ing natural forms. Standing before the Medicean 
tombs the modern susceptibility receives perhaps 
the most poignant, one may almost say the most 
intolerable, impression to be obtained from any 
plastic work by the hand of man ; but it is a totally 
different impression from that left by the sculp- 
tures of the Parthenon pediments, not only because 
the sentiment is wholly different, but because in the 
great Florentine's work it is so overwhelming as 
wholly to dominate purely natural expression, natu- 
ral character, natural beauty. In the Medici Chapel 
the soul is exalted ; in the British Museum the 



216 FRENCH AET 

mind is enraptured. The object itself seems to disap- 
pear in the one case, and to reveal itself in the other. 

I do not mean to compare M. Rodin with the 
Greeks — from whom in sentiment and imagination 
he is, of course, as totally removed as what is in- 
tensely modern must be from the antique — any more 
than I mean to contrast him with IVIichael Angelo, 
except for the purposes of clearer understanding of 
his general aesthetic attitude. Association of any- 
thing contemporai-y with what is classic, and especi- 
ally with what is greatest in the classic, is always a 
perilous proceeding. Very little time is apt to play 
havoc with such classification. I mean only to in- 
dicate that the resemblance to Michael Angelo, 
found by so many persons in such works as the 
Dante doors, is only of the loosest kind — as one 
might, through their common lusciousness, compare 
peaches with pomegranates — and that to the dis- 
cerning eye, or the eye at all experienced in obseiw- 
ing sculpture, M. Rodin's sculpture is far more 
closely related to that of Donatello and the Greeks. 
It, too, reveals rather than constructs beauty, and by 
the expression of character rather than by the sug- 
gestion of sentiment. 

An illustration of M. Rodin's affinity with the an- 
tique is an incident which he related to me of his 
work upon his superb "Age d'Airain." He was in 
Naples ; he saw nature in freer inadvertence than 



THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTUEE 217 

she allows elsewhere ; he had the best of models. 
Under these favoring circumstances he spent three 
months on a leg of his statue ; " which is equivalent 
to saying that I had at last absolutely mastered it," 
said he. One day in the Museo Nazionale he no- 
ticed in an antique the result of all his study and 
research. Nature, in other words, is M. Kodin's 
material in the same special sense in which it was 
the antique material, and in which, since Michael 
Angelo and the high Eenaissance, it has been for 
the most part only the sculptor's mea^is. It need 
not be said that the personality of the artist may be 
as strenuous in the one case as in the other ; unless, 
indeed, we maintain, as perhaps we may, that indi- 
viduality is more apt to atrophy in the latter in- 
stance ; for as one gets farther and farther away 
from nature he is in more danger from conventional- 
ity than from caprice. And this is in fact what has 
happened since the high Renaissance, the long line of 
conventionalities being continued, sometimes punctu- 
ated here and there as by Clodion or Houdon, Dav- 
id, Eude, or Barye, sometimes rising into great dig- 
nity and refinement of style and intelligence, as in 
the contemporary sculpture of the Institute, but in 
general almost purely decorative or sentimental, and, 
so far as natural expression is concerned, confining 
itself to psychological rather than physical character. 
What is it, for instance, that distinguishes a 



218 FRENCH AET 

group like M. Dubois's " Charity " from the genre 
sentiment or incident of some German or Italian 
"professor?" Qualities of style, of refined taste, 
of elegance, of true intelligence. Its artistic interest 
is purely decorative and sentimental. Keally what 
its average admirer sees in it is the same moral ap- 
peal that delights the simple admirers of German 
or Italian treatment of a similar theme. It is simply 
infinitely higher bred. Its character is developed 
no further. Its significance as form is not insisted 
on. The parts are not impressively differentiated, 
and their mysterious mutual relations and corre- 
spondences are not dwelt on. The physical charac- 
ter, with its beauties, its salient traits of every kind, 
appealing so strongly to the sculptor to whom nat- 
ure appears plastic as well as suggestive, is wholly 
neglected in favor of the psychological suggestion. 
And the individual chai'acter, the cachet of the 
whole, the artistic essence and ensemble, that is to 
say, M. Dubois has, after the manner of most mod- 
ern sculpture, conveyed in a language of conven- 
tion, which since the time of the Siennese fountain, 
at all events, has been classical. 

The Hterary artist does not proceed in this way. 
He does not content himself with telling us, for ex- 
ample, that one of his characters is a good man or a 
bad man, an able, a selfish, a taU, a blonde, or a stu- 
pid man, as the case may be. He takes every means 



THE ]SrEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTURE 219 

to express his character, and to do it, according to M. 
Taine's definition of a work of art, more completely 
than it appears in nature. He recognizes its com- 
plexity and enforces the sense of reality by a thou- 
sand expedients of what one may almost call con- 
trasting masses, derivative movements, and balanc- 
ing planes. He distinguishes every possible detail 
that plays any structural part, and, in short, instead 
of giving us the mere symbol of the Sunday-school 
books, shows us a concrete organism at once char- 
acteristic and complex. Judged with this strictness, 
which in literary art is elementary, how much of the 
best modern sculpture is abstract, symbolic, purely 
typical. What insipid fragments most of the 
really eminent Institute statues would make were 
their heads knocked off by some band of modern 
barbarian invaders. In the event of such an irrup- 
tion, would there be any torsos left from which 
future Poussins could learn all they should know of 
the human form ? Would there be any disjecta mem- 
bra from which skilled anatomists could reconstruct 
the lost ensemble, or at any rate make a shrewd guess 
at it ? Would anything survive mutilation with the 
serene confidence in its fragmentary but everywhere 
penetrating interest which seems to pervade the 
most fractured fraction of a Greek relief on the 
Athenian acropolis ? Yes, there would be the debris 
of Auguste Eodin's sculpture. 



220 FRENCH ART 

In our day the human figure has never been so 
well understood. Back of such expressive modelling 
as we note in the " Saint Jean," in the " Adam " and 
"Eve," in the " Calaisiens," in a dozen figures of 
the Dante doors, is a knowledge of anatomy such as 
even in the purely scientific profession of surgery 
can proceed only from an immense fondness for 
nature, an insatiable curiosity as to her secrets, an 
inexhaustible delight in her manifestations. From 
the point of view of such knowledge and such hand- 
ling of it, it is no wonder that the representations of 
nature which issue from the Institute seem superficial. 
One can understand that from this point of view very 
delightful sculpture, very refined, very graceful, very 
perfectly understood within its limits, may appear like 
baudruche — inflated gold-beater's skin, that is to say, 
of which toy animals are made in France, and which 
has thus passed into studio argot as the figure for 
whatever lacks structure and substance. Ask M. 
Kodin the explanation of a movement, an attitude, 
in one of his works which strikes your convention- 
steeped sense as strange, and he will account for it 
just as an anatomical demonstrator would — pointing 
out its necessary derivation from some disposition 
of another part of the figure, and not at all dwell- 
ing on its grace or its other purely decorative felic- 
ity. Its artistic function in his eyes is to aid in ex- 
pressing fully and completely the whole of which it 



THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTUEE 221 

forms a part, not to constitute a harmonious de- 
tail merely agreeable to the easily satisfied eye. But 
then the whole will look anatomical rather than ar- 
tistic. There is the point exactly. Will it ? I re- 
member speculating about this in conversation with 
M. Eodin himself. "Isn't there danger," I said, "of 
getting too fond of nature, of dissecting with so 
much enthusiasm that the pleasure of discovery may 
obscure one's feeling for pure beauty, of losing the 
artistic in the purely scientific interest, of becoming 
pedantic, of imitating rather than constructing, of 
missing art in avoiding the artificial ? '* I had some 
difficulty in making myself understood ; this per- 
petual see-saw of nature and art which enshrouds 
sesthetic dialectics as in a Scotch mist seems curi- 
ously factitious to the truly imaginative mind. But 
I shall always remember his reply, when he finally 
made me out, as one of the finest severings conceiv- 
able of a Gordian knot of this kind. " Oh, yes," 
said he ; " there is, no doubt, such a danger for a 
mediocre artist." 

M. Kodin is, whatever one may think of him, cer- 
tainly not a mediocre artist. The instinct of self- 
preservation may incline the Institute to assert that 
he obtrudes his anatomy. But prejudice itself can 
blind no one of intelligence to his immense imagin- 
ative power, to his poetic " possession." His work 
precisely illustrates what I take to have been, at the 



222 FREl^CH ART 

best epochs, the relations of nature to such art as 
is loosely to be called imitative art — what assuredly 
were those relations in the mind of the Greek artist. 
Nature supplies the parts and suggests their cardi- 
nal relations. Insufficient study of her leaves these 
superficial and insipid. Inartistic absorption in her 
leaves them lifeless. The imagination which has it- 
self conceived the whole, the idea, fuses them in its 
own heat into a new creation which is "imitative" 
only in the sense that its elements are not inven- 
tions. The art of sculpture has retraced its steps 
far enough to make pure invention, as of Gothic grif- 
fins and Romanesque symbology, unsatisfactory to 
everyone. But, save in M. Rodin's sculpture, it has 
not fully renewed the old alliance with nature on the 
old terms — Donatello's terms ; the terms which ex- 
act the most tribute from nature, which insist on her 
according her comj^letest significance, her closest 
secrets, her faculty of expressing character as well 
as of suggesting sentiment. Very beautiful works 
are produced without her aid to this extent. "We 
may be sure of this without asking M. Rodin to ad- 
mit it. He would not do his own work so well were 
he prepared to ; as MiUet pointed out when asked 
to write a criticism of some other painter's canvas, 
in estimating the production of his fellows an artist 
is inevitably handicapped by the feeling that he 
would have done it very differently himself. It is 



THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTURE 223 

easy not to share M. Rodin's gloomy vaticinations 
as to French sculpture based on the continued tri- 
umph of the Institute style and suavity. The In- 
stitute sculpture is too good for anyone not him- 
self engaged in the struggle to avoid being impressed 
chiefly by its qualities to the neglect of its defects. 
At the same time it is clear that no art can long sur- 
vive in undiminished vigor that does not from time 
to time renew its vitality by resteeping itself in the 
influences of nature. And so M. Rodin's service to 
French sculpture becomes, at the present moment, 
especially signal and salutary because French sculpt- 
ure, however refined and dehghtful, shows, just 
now, very plainly the tendency toward the conven- 
tional which has always proved so dangerous, and 
because M. Rodin's work is a conspicuous, a shining 
example of the return to nature on the part not of a 
mere realist, naturalist, or other variety of " medi- 
ocre artist," but of a profoundly poetic and imagin- 
ative temperament. 

This is why, one immediately perceives in study- 
ing his works, Rodin's treatment, while exhausting 
every contributary detail to the end of complete ex- 
pression, is never permitted to fritter away its energy 
either in the mystifications of optical illusion, or in 
the infantine idealization of what is essentially sub- 
ordinate and ancillary. This is why he devotes 
three months to the study of a leg, for example — 



224 FEENCH AKT 

not to copy, but to "possess" it. Indeed, no 
sculptor of our time has made such a sincere and, 
in general, successful, effort to sink the sense of the 
material in the conception, the actual object in the 
artistic idea. One loses all sense of bronze or mar- 
ble, as the case may be, not only because the artis- 
tic significance is so overmastering that one is ex- 
clusively occupied in apprehending it, but because 
there are none of those superficial graces, those fe- 
licities of surface modelling, vsrhich, however they 
may delight, infallibly distract as well. Such excel- 
lences have assuredly their place. When the motive 
is conventional or otherwise insipid, or even when 
its character is distinctly light without being trivial, 
they are legitimately enough agreeable. And be- 
cause, in our day, sculptural motives have generally 
been of this order we have become accustomed to 
look for such excellences, and, very justly, to miss 
them when they are absent. Grace of pose, suavity 
of outline, pleasing disposition of mass, smooth, 
round deltoids and osseous articulations, and per- 
petually changing planes of flesh and free play of 
muscular movement, are excellences which, in the 
best of academic French sculpture, are sensuously 
delightful in a high degree. But they invariably rivet 
our attention on the successful way in which the 
sculptor has used his bronze or marble to decor- 
ative ends, and when they are accentuated so as to 



THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTUEE 225 

dominate the idea they invariably enfeeble its ex- 
pression. With M. Kodin one does not think of his 
material at all ; one does not reflect whether he used 
it well or ill, caused it to lose weight and immobility 
to the eye or not, because all his superficial model- 
ling appears as an inevitable deduction from the way 
in which he has conceived his larger subject, and 
not as " handUng " at all. In reality, of course, it is 
the acme of sensitive handling. The point is a nice 
one. His practice is a dangerous one. It would be 
fatal to a less strenuous temperament. To leave, in 
a manner and so far as obvious insistence on it goes, 
" handling " to take care of itself, is to incur the 
peril of careless, clumsy, and even brutal, modelling, 
which, so far from dissembling its existence behind 
the prominence of the idea, really emphasizes itself 
unduly because of its imperfect and undeveloped 
character. Detail that is neglected really acquires 
a greater prominence than detail that is carried 
too far, because it is sensuously disagxeeable. But 
when an artist like M. Eodin conceives his spiritual 
subject so largely and with so much intensity that 
mere sensuous agreeableness seems too insignifi- 
cant to him even to be treated with contempt, he 
treats his detail solely with reference to its centripetal 
and organic value, which immediately becomes im- 
mensely enhanced, and the detail itself, dropping thus 
into its proper place, takes on a beauty wholly trans- 



226 FRENCH ART 

cending the ordinary agreeable aspect of sculptural 
detail. And the ensemble, of course, is in this way 
enforced as it can be in no other, and we get an idea 
of Victor Hugo or St. John Baptist so powerfully 
and yet so subtly suggested, that the abstraction 
seems actually all that we see in looking at the 
concrete bust or statue. Objections to IVL Eodin's 
" handling " as eccentric or capricious, appear to the 
sympathetic beholder of one of his majestic works 
the very acme of misappreciation, and their real ex- 
cuse — which is, as I have said, the fact that such 
" handling " is as unfamiliar as the motives it ac- 
companies — singularly poor and feeble. 

As for the common nature of these motives, the 
character of the personality which appears in their 
varied presentments, it is almost idle to speak in 
the absence of the work itself, so eloquent is this at 
once and so untranslatable. But it may be said ap- 
proximately that M. Rodin's temperament is in the 
first place deeply romantic. Everything the Insti- 
tute likes repels him. He has the poetic conception 
of art and its mission, and in poetry any authorita- 
tive and codifying consensus seems to him paradoxi- 
cal. Style, in his view, unless it is something wholly 
uncharacterizable, is a vague and impalpable spirit 
breathing through the work of some strongly marked 
individuality, or else it is formalism. He delights 
in the fantasticality of the Gothic. The west fayade 



THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTUKE 227 

of Eouen inspires him more than all the formulae of 
Palladian proportions. He detests systematization. 
He reads Shakespeare, Schiller, Dante almost exclu- 
sively. He sees visions and dreams dreams. The 
awful in the natural forces, moral and material, 
seems his element. He beheves in freedom, in the 
absolute emancipation of every faculty. As for 
study, study nature. If then you fail in restraint 
and measure you are a " mediocre artist," whom no 
artificial system devised to secure measure and re- 
straint could have rescued from essential insignifi- 
cance. No poet or landscape painter ever delighted 
more in the infinitely varied suggestiveness and ex- 
uberance of nature, or ever felt the formality of 
much that passes for art as more chill and drear. 
Hence in all his works we have the sense, first of all, 
of an overmastering sincerity ; then of a prodigious 
wealth of fancy ; then of a marvellous acquaintance 
with his material. His imagination has all the 
vivacity and tumultuousness of Rubens's, but its 
images, if not better understood, which would per- 
haps be impossible, are more compact and their 
evolution more orderly. And they are furthermore 
one and all vivified by a wholly remarkable feeling 
for beauty. In spite of all his knowledge of the ex- 
ternal world, no artist of our time is more com- 
pletely mastered by sentiment. In the very circum- 
stance of being free from such conventions as the 



228 FRENCH ART 

cameo relief, the picturesque costume details, the 
goldsmith's work characteristic of the Eenaissance, 
now so much in vogue, M. Kodin's things acquire a 
certain largeness and loftiness as well as simplicity 
and sincerity of sentiment. The same model posed 
for the " Saint Jean " that posed for a dozen things 
turned out of the academic studios, but compared 
with the result in the latter cases, that in the former 
is even more remarkable for sentiment than for its 
structural sapience and general physical interest. 
How perfectly insignificant beside its moral im- 
pressiveness are the graceful works whose senti- 
ment does not result from the expression of the 
form, but is conveyed in some convention of pose, of 
gesture, of physiognomy ! It is like the contrast 
between a great and a graceful actor. The one in- 
terests you by his intelligent mastery of convention, 
by the tact and taste with which he employs in 
voice, carriage, facial expression, gesture, diction, 
the several conventions according to which ideas 
and emotions are habitually conveyed to your com- 
prehension. Salvini, Coquelin, Got, pass immedi- 
ately outside the realm of conventions. Their lan- 
guage, their medium of communication, is as new 
as what it expresses. They are inventive as well as 
intelligent. Their effect is prodigiously heightened 
because in this way, the warp as well as the woof 
of their art being expressive and original, the ar- 



THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTUEE 229 

tistic result is greatly fortified. Given the same 
model, M. Eodin's result is in like manner expressly 
and originally enfoi'ced far beyond the result to- 
ward which the academic French school employs 
the labels of the Eenaissance as conventionally as 
its predecessor at the beginning of the century em- 
ployed those of the antique. " Formerly we used 
to do Greek," says M. Kodin, with no small justice ; 
"now we do Italian. That is all the difference 
there is." And I cannot better conclude this im- 
perfect notice of the work of a great master, in 
characterizing which such epithets as majestic. Mil- 
tonic, grandiose suggest themselves first of all, than 
by calling attention to the range which it covers, 
and to the fact that, even into the domain which one 
would have called consecrate to the imitators of the 
antique and the Renaissance, M. Rodin's informing 
sentiment and sense of beauty penetrate with their 
habitual distinction ; and that the little child's head 
entitled " Alsace," that considerable portion of his 
work represented by "The Wave and the Shore," 
for example, and a small ideal female figure, which 
the manufacturer might covet for reproduction, 
but which, as Bastien-Lepage said to me, is "a 
definition of the essence of art," are really as noble 
as his more majestic works are beautiful. 



230 FRENCH ART 



AuBE is another sculptor of acknowledged emi- 
nence who ranges himself with M. Rodin in his op- 
position to the Institute. His figures of " Bailly " 
and "Dante" are very fine, full of a most impres- 
sive dignity in the ensemble, and marked by the 
most vigorous kind of modelling. One may easily 
like his " Gambetta " less. But for years Rodin's 
only eminent fellow sculptor was Dalou. Perhaps 
his protestantism has been less pronounced than M. 
Rodin's. It was certainly long more successful in 
winning both the connoisseur and the public. The 
state itself, which is now and then even more con- 
servative than the Institute, has charged him with 
important works, and the Salon has given him its 
highest medal. And he was thus recognized long 
before M. Rodin's works had risen out of the tur- 
moil of critical contention to their present envied 
if not cordially approved eminence. But for being 
less energetic, less absorbed, less intense than M. 
Rodin's, M. Dalou's enthusiasm for nature involves 
a scarcely less uncompromising dislike of conven- 
tion. He had no success at the Ecole des Beaux 
Arts. Unlike Rodin, he entered those precincts and 
worked long within them, but never sympathetically 
or felicitously. The rigor of academic precept was 



THE KEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTURE 231 

from the first excessively distasteful to his essen- 
tially and eminently romantic nature. He chafed 
incessantly. The training doubtless stood him in 
good stead when he found himself driven by hard 
necessity into commercial sculpture, into that class 
of work which is on a very high plane for its kind 
in Paris, but for which the manufacturer rather 
than the designer receives the credit. But he 
probably felt no gratitude to it for this, persuaded 
that but for its despotic prevalence there would 
have been a clearer field for his spontaneous and 
agreeable effort to win distinction in. He greatly 
preferred at this time the artistic anarchy of Eng- 
land, whither he betook himself after the Commune 
■ — not altogether upon compulsion, but by prudence 
perhaps ; for like Eodin, his bu'th, his training, his 
disposition, his ideas, have always been as hberal 
and popular in politics as in art, and in France a 
man of any sincerity and dignity of character has 
profound political convictions, even though his pro- 
fession be purely sesthetic. In England he was very 
successful both at the Academy and with the ama- 
teurs of the aristocracy, of many of whom he made 
portraits, besides finding ready purchasers among 
them for his imaginative works. The hst of these 
latter begins, if we except some delightful decora- 
tion for one of the Champs-Elysees palaces, with a 
statue called " La Brodeuse," which won for him a 



232 FRENCH ART 

medal at the Salon of 1870. Since then his produc- 
tion has been prodigious in view of its originality, 
of its lack of the powerful momentum extraneously 
supplied to the productive force that follows con- 
vention and keeps in the beaten track. 

His numerous peasant subjects at one time led to 
comparison of him with Millet, but the likeness is 
of the most superficial kind. There is no spiritual 
kinship whatever between him and Millet. Dalou 
models the Marquis de Dreux-Breze with as much 
zest as he does his " Boulonnaise allaitant son en- 
fant ; " his touch is as sympathetic in his Kubens- 
like "Silenus" as in his naturalistic "Berceuse." 
Furthermore, there is absolutely no note of melan- 
choly in his realism — which, at the present time, 
is a point well worth noting. His vivacity excludes 
the pathetic. Traces of Carpeaux's influence are 
plain in his way of conceiving such subjects as Car- 
peaux would have handled. No one could have 
come so closely into contact with that vigorous in- 
dividuality without in some degree undergoing its 
impress, without learning to look for the alert and 
elegant aspects of his model, whatever it might be. 
But with Carpeaux's distinction Dalou has more 
poise. He is considerably farther away from the 
rococo. His ideal is equally to be summarized in 
the word Life, but he cares more for its essence, 
so to speak, than for its phenomena, or at all 



THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTUEE 233 

events manages to make it felt rather than seen. 
One perceives that humanity interests him on the 
moral side, that he is interested in its signifi- 
cance as well as its form. Accordingly with him 
the movement illustrates the form, which is in its 
turn truly expressive, whereas occasionally, so bit- 
ter was his disgust with the pedantry of the schools, 
with Carpeaux the form is used to exhibit move- 
ment. Then, too, M. Dalou has a certain nobility 
which Garpeaux's vivacity is a shade too animated 
to reach. Motive and treatment blend in a larger 
sweep. The graver substance follows the planes 
and lines of a statelier if less brilliant style. It 
has, in a word, more style. 

I can find no exacter epithet, on the whole, for 
Dalou's large distinction, and conscious yet sober 
freedom, than the word Venetian. There is some 
subtle phrenotype that associates him with the great 
colorists. His work is, in fact, full of color, if one 
may trench on the jargon of the studios. It has 
the sumptuousness of Titian and Paul Veronese. 
Its motives are cast in the same ample mould. Many 
of his figures breathe the same air of high-born ease 
and well-being, of serene and not too intellectual 
composure. There is an aristocratic tincture even 
in his peasants — a kind of native distinction insepa- 
rable from his touch. And in his women there is a 
certain gracious sweetness, a certain exquisite and 



234 FRENCH ART 

elusive refinement elsewhere caught only by Tin- 
toretto, but illustrated by Tintoretto with such pen- 
etrating intensity as to leave perhaps the most near- 
ly indelible impression that the sensitive amateur 
carries away with him from Venice. The female 
figures in the colossal group which should have 
been placed in the Place de la Republique, but was 
relegated by official stupidity to the Place des Na- 
tions, are examples of this patrician charm in car- 
riage, in form, in feature, in expression. They 
have not the witchery, the touch of Bohemian 
sprightliness that make such figures as Carpeaux's 
"Flora" so enchanting, but they are at once sweeter 
and more distinguished. The sense for the exqui- 
site which this betrays excludes all dross from M. 
Dalou's rich magnificence. Even the " Silenus " 
group illustrates exuberance without excess : I spoke 
of it just now as Rubens-like, but it is only because 
it recalls Rubens's superb strength and riotous 
fancy ; it is in reality a Rubens-like motive purged 
in the execution of all Flemish grossness. There is 
even in Dalou's fantasticality of this sort a measure 
and distinction which temper animation into resem- 
blance to such delicate blitheness as is illustrated 
by the Bargello " Bacchus " of Jacopo Sansovino. 
Sansovino afterward, by the way, amid the artifici- 
ality of Venice, whither he went, wholly lost his in- 
dividual force, as M. Dalou, owing to his love of 



THE ISTEW MOVEMENT 11^ SCULPTURE 235 

nature, is less likely to do. But his sketch for a 
monument to Victor Hugo, and perhaps still more 
his memorial of Delacroix in the Luxembourg Gar- 
dens, point warningly in this direction, and it 
would perhaps be easier than he supposes to per- 
mit his extraordinary decorative facihty to lead 
him on to execute works unpenetrated by personal 
feeling, and recalling less the acme of the Kenais- 
sance than the period just afterward, when original 
effort had exhausted itself and the movement of art 
was due mainly to momentum — when, as in France 
at the present moment, the enormous mass of ar- 
tistic production really forced pedantry upon cult- 
ure, and prevented any but the most strenuous 
personalities from being genuine, because of the 
immensely increased authoritativeness of what had 
become classic. 

Certainly M. Dalou is far more nearly in the cur- 
rent of contemporary art than his friend Eodin, 
who stands with his master Barye rather defiantly 
apart from the regular evolution of French sculpt- 
ure, whereas one can easily trace the derivation of M. 
Dalou and his relations to the present and the im- 
mediate past of his art in his country. His work cer- 
tainly has its Fragonard, its Clodion, its Carpeaux 
side. Like every temperament that is strongly at- 
tracted by the decorative as well as the significant 
and the expressive, pure style in and for itself has 



236 FRENCH AET 

its fascinations, its temptations for him. Of course it 
does not succeed in getting the complete possession 
of him that it has of the Institute. And there is, as 
I have suggested, an important difference, disclosed 
in the fact that M. Dalou uses his faculty for style in 
a personal rather than in the conventional way. His 
decoration is distinctly Dalou, and not arrange- 
ments after classic formulae. It is full of zest, of 
ardor, of audacity. So that if his work has what 
one may call its national side, it is because the au- 
thor's temperament is thoroughly national at bot- 
tom, and not because this temperament is feeble or 
has been academically repressed. But the manifest 
fitness with which it takes its place in the category 
of French sculpture shows the moral difference be- 
tween it and the work of M. Rodin. Morally speak- 
ing, it is mainly — not altogether, but mainl}' — rhe- 
torical, whereas M. Rodin's is distinctly poetic. It 
is delightful rhetoric and it has many poetic strains 
— such as the charm of penetrating distinction I 
have mentioned. But with the passions in their 
simplest and last analysis he hardly occupies him- 
self at all. Such a work as "La Republique," the 
magnificent bas-relief of the Hotel de Ville in Paris, 
is a triumph of allegorical rhetoric, very noble, not 
a little moving, prodigious in its wealth of imagina- 
tive material, composed from the centre and not ar- 
ranged with artificial felicity, full of suggestiveness, 



THE IfEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTUEE 237 

full of power, abounding in definite sculptural quali- 
ties, both moral and technical ; it again is Eubens- 
iike in its exuberance, but of firmer texture, more 
closely condensed. But anything approaching the 
kind of impressiveness of the Dante portal it cer- 
tainly does not essay. It is in quite a different 
sphere. Its exaltation is, if not deliberate, admira- 
bly self-possessed. To find it theatrical would be 
simply a mark of our absurd Anglo-Saxon prefer- 
ence for reserve and repression in circumstances 
naturally suggesting expansion and elation— a pref- 
erence surely born of timorousness and essentially 
very subtly theatrical itself. It is simply not deep- 
ly, intensely poetic, but, rather, a splendid piece of 
rhetoric, as I say. 

So, too, is the famous Mirabeau relief, which is 
perhaps M. Dalou's niasterpiece, and which repre- 
sents his national side as completely as the group 
for the Place des Nations does those of his qualities 
I have endeavored to indicate by calling them Vene- 
tian. Observe the rare fidelity which has contrib- 
uted its weight of sincerity to this admirable relief. 
Every prominent head of the many members of the 
Assembly, who nevertheless rally behind Mirabeau 
with a fine pell-mell freedom of artistic effect, is a 
portrait. The effect is like that of similar works 
designed and executed with the large leisure of an 
age very different from the competition and strug- 



238 FEENCH ART 

gling hurry of our own. In every respect this work 
is as French as it is individual. It is penetrated 
with a sense of the dignity of French history. It is 
as far as possible removed from the cheap gemre 
effect such a scheme in less skilful hands might 
easily have had. I^Iirabeau's gesture, in fact his en- 
tire presence, is superb, but the marquis is as fine 
in his way as the tribune in his. The beholder as- 
sists at the climax of a great crisis, unfolded to him 
in the impartial spirit of true art, quite without 
partisanship, and though manifestly stimulated by 
sympathy with the nobler cause, even more acutely 
conscious of the grandeur of the struggle and the 
distinction of those on all sides engaged in it, and 
acquiring from these a kind of elation, of exaltation 
such as the Frenchman experiences only when he 
may give expression to his artistic and his patriotic 
instincts at the same moment. 

The distinctly national qualities of this master- 
piece, and their harmonious association with the in- 
dividual characteristics of M. Dalou, his love of nat- 
ure, his native distinction, his charm, and his 
power, in themselves bear eminent witness to the 
vitality of modern French sculpture, in spite of all 
the influences which tend to petrify it with system 
and convention. M. Rodin stands so wholly apart 
that it would be unsafe perhaps to argue confident- 
ly from his impressive works the potentiahty of 



THE NEW MOVEMENT IN SCULPTURE 239 

periodical renewal in an art over which the Institute 
presides with still so little challenge of its title. 
But it is different with M. Dalou. Extraordinary 
as his talent is, its unquestioned and universal rec- 
ognition is probably in great measure due to the 
preparedness of the environment to appreciate ex- 
traordinary work of the kind, to the high degree 
which French popular a3sthetic education, in a word, 
has reached. And one's last word about contempo- 
rary French sculpture — even in closing a considera- 
tion of the works of such protestants as Eodin and 
Dalou — must be a recognition of the immense ser- 
vice of the Institute in education of this kind. Let 
some country without an institute, around which 
what aesthetic feeling the age permits may crystal- 
lize, however sharply, give us a Eodin and a Dalou ! 



VII 
EODIN AND THE INSTITUTE 



EODIN AND THE INSTITUTE 

I 

The "^ew Movement ^^ has flourislied. Since 
the foregoing pages were written* it has established 
itself firmly. And the prominence of Rodin as its 
master spirit has increased, and imposes further 
consideration of his work and its relation to the 
sculpture it has in some measure supplanted. By 
this time Rodin^s bibliography is greater than that 
of the combined Institute school. With Puvis de 
Chavannes alone among French artists, perhaps^ 
he has recently shared the primacy of both popular 
and dilettante interest. Important commissions 
have been added to that of the Porte de FEnf er for 
the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, intrusted to him 
by Proust so long ago when his work was gener- 
ally deemed eccentric and revolutionary merely — 
the monuments to Claude Lorrain. to Bastien-Le- 
page, to Victor Hugo, to the Bourgeois of Calais, 
to Balzac. The sensation made by his execution 
of the last-named every one will recall. It marked 

* See Not€ at beginning of volume. 



244 FEENCH AET 

the culmination of Rodin's vogue in crystallizing 
popular opinion, in transforming into hostility 
what popular indifference and ignorance (especially 
the ignorance) still existed about him, and in de- 
veloping his admirers into partisans not to say 
fanatics. Thenceforth, at all events, popular 
opinion felt that he had no new surprises for it. 
More markedly than his other works, more unmis- 
takably, more brutally, as the French say, the 
^''Balzac" distinguishes his sculpture from that of 
the graceful and elegant art that has been evolved 
under the cegis of the Institute. So that, taken in 
connection with his singularizing exhibit at the Ex- 
position in 1900, the sensation over the '^'^ Balzac ^^ 
may be said to have created for the public in gen- 
eral, interested in such matters, an interesting ^'^situ- 
ation " in French sculpture at the present time. 

The situation is briefly this : What is known as 
the Modern French School, the Institute or aca- 
demic sculptors, the sculptors who follow the tra- 
ditions of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts are on one 
side; on the other are Eodin, Dalou, Aube, Bar- 
tholom6, and one or two more who have hardly 
reached eminence as yet, together with a very con- 
siderable number of intelligent practitioners who 
show in a marked — and often in an excessive — 
way the influence of Rodin^s gospel of expression 
and animation. Of course such a powerful per- 



BODIES' AKD THE I]N^STITUTE 245 

sonality as Eodin^'s, now that it has expressed it- 
self so adequately and in such luxuriance as his 
has done, is universally recognized even by tradi- 
tional critics and public as something to be reck- 
oned with. But high as he now stands, different 
as is his position now from what it was not so very 
long ago when eccentricity was regarded as the 
main characteristic of his talent, nevertheless the 
traditional criticism even in Paris — the home 
equally of new ideas and of academic convention — 
is undoubtedly more inclined contentedly to repose 
upon what it regards as the safe thing, the thing 
that requires of it no re-pigeonholing of its no- 
tions, upon, in a word, the Institute sculpture. 

Now, the Institute sculpture of the present day 
is thoroughly imitative and Italianate. Its model 
is the sculpture of the Italian Eenaissance. It 
modifies this model very perceptibly by the addi- 
tion of the French element of style, as it could 
hardly fail to do, being French at all ; for the most 
individual trait of the French artistic genius is a 
faculty for style, for the generalized, typical, syn- 
thetized presentation of artistic material, in con- 
tradistinction to the free and fanciful individual- 
ized treatment of the Italian Eenaissance. At the 
same time M. Eodin is perfectly right in the remark 
which he made to me some years ago and which 
I have already cited: '^Autrefois nous faisions 



246 FEElSrCH AET 

dii grec, maintenant nous faisons de Pitalien/' 
^^ Formerly we did the Greek thing" (meaning 
Pradier^ for example); '^now we do the Italian^' 
(meaning the current Institute sculpture). Com- 
pare, for instance, M. Merci^^s '' David/' sheath- 
ing his sword after slaying Goliath, with Dona- 
tello's figure of the same subject, or M. Paul 
Dubois's ^' Charity " from the admirable tomb of 
General de Lamoriciere at Nantes with Jacopo 
Delia Quercia's group of the Sienna fountain. 
The French two are essentially reflections. M. 
Saint-Marceaux's fine ^^ Genius Guarding the Secret 
of the Tomb " is similarly inspired by the Youths 
of the Sistine ceiling. Instances might be multi- 
plied. There is a difference, but it is a national, 
not a personal difference. Essentially it is the 
same thing, done from the same point of view, only 
by a sculptor of a different nationality under dif- 
ferent conditions. Even of Fr^miet's admirable 
equestrian figures, his ^^ Jeanne d' Arc " of the 
Place des Pyramides, his ^^ Louis d'Orl^ans" of 
the Chateau de Pierrefonds, his '' Torch-bearer '^ 
of the Middle Ages of the Paris H6tel de Ville, 
one's first thought is : Would they ever have ex- 
isted, or would they have existed in just the aspect 
they have, had it not been for the " Bartolommeo 
Colleoni " of Verrocchio at Venice or the ^^ Gatta- 
melata " of Donatello at Padua ? 



RODII^ AND THE IIS^STITUTE 247 

Well in opposition to this spirit of traditionary 
respect for^ and refinement upon, and delicate 
variation of, types already fixed-, suddenly appears 
Auguste Eodin. His art is thoronghly revolution- 
ary of received standards. It furnishes what the 
French call a point de repere and recalls routine 
to its point of departure, as the appearance of a 
great artist, a master, always does. The mistake, 
before referred to, of calling him a French Mi- 
chael Angelo, is a serviceable one to illustrate just 
the point I desire to emphasize with regard to the 
Institute sculpture from which Eodin's differs so 
radically. He is a parallel but neither an imitator 
nor a follower of Michael Angelo. That is to say 
his temperament is in some measure analogous to 
that of the great Florentine, but his art is his own. 
Some of his figures recall figures of Michael An- 
gelo, but they recall them in a directly opposite 
way from that in which the Institute sculpture 
recalls the sculpture of the Renaissance. To be- 
gin with, they recall them powerfully not weakly 
— but that is nothing. They are conceived in 
somewhat the same spirit, not run in the same 
mould — which is everything. The impressive 
figure of the "Thinker,'' the "Poet,'' the 
"Dreamer" which dominates and seems to evoke 
the multitudinous images of the Dante por- 
tal for the Musee des Arts Decoratifs recalls the 



248 FEENCH ART 

'' Pensieroso '' of the Medici chapel. The 
" Adam " of the same composition recalls one of 
the slaves for the monument of Pope Julius II., 
the ^'Age d^Airain^' the other. But note how 
differently they suggest them from the way in 
which M. Saint-Marceaux^s '' Genius/^ for in- 
stance, suggests one of the Athletes of the Sistine 
ceiling. The resemblance is in movement, in 
general conception, in those characteristics which 
are the common property of all artists of all time. 
M. Saint-Marceaux's figure is essentially a variant. 



II 

More speciously but not more soundly Rodin 
has been said to derive from the Gothic. I say 
'^speciously," because the implication is that his 
sculpture sustains the same relation to Gothic 
sculpture that the Institute sculpture does to that 
, of the Italian Renaissance, an imitative relation, 
that is to say. As a matter of fact, imitation of 
Gothic sculpture is impossible. Its essence is 
freedom ; there is nothing about it to imitate, no 
formula to repeat. The "Gothic revival" of 
which we used to hear so much owed its strength 
to its conception of '' Gothic " as an artistic atti- 
tude, and declined in platitudes when, forgetting 



RODIIS- AND THE II^STITUTE 249 

this, it endeavored to reproduce artistic forms. 
However true it may be that '^mankind is one 
in spirit/' in anything with so prominent an ex- 
ternal side as plastic art, the modern and the medi- 
agval world differ too widely to resemble each other 
greatly in their genuine expressions. In a sense, 
of course, Eodin's sculpture has a Gothic deriva- 
tion, and in looking at it one recalls Rheims as 
reasonably as, on account of its grandeur of style 
and sentiment, he does Michael Angelo and, on 
account of its plastic beauties, the antique. For 
that matter Rheims itself recalls the antique and 
in most vivid fashion. "They say I copy the 
Primitifs," said Puvis de Chavannes. '^ Why not 
say I have the same temperament and see things 
in the same way?'"* — that is, the way of looking at 
them that antedated formulary; the natural way 
of viewing nature; the way that was abandoned 
only when the eminence of the Cinquecentists 
overwhelmed their feebler successors and imposed 
upon their hypnotized incapacity types so palpably 
perfect as, excusably, to constitute an obsession 
for them. Rodin's resemblance to the Gothic re- 
sides in his illustration of the same freedom, the 
same susceptibility to new problems, the same 
inclination to new solutions of old ones, the same 
delight in nature's inexhaustibility, the same care- 
lessness for completeness and perfection. His art 



250 FEEIs^CH AET 

is altogether too personal for formulary of any kind 
to have furnished \t^ provenance. 

There is^ however^ one element of it which allies 
it with mediaeval art even more closely than its free- 
dom and its attitude of dealing directly with nature 
— its sentiment namely. It is saturated with the 
sentiment in virtue of which the modern and the 
mediaeval world enjoy a kinship unshared by the 
antique. The antique world had its own senti- 
ment, and a sentiment of which we probably com- 
prehend very little the depth, the elevation, or the 
quality. But compared with the mediaeval and 
the modern sentiment it may be said to have been 
held tranquilly in the leash of reason, and to have 
been — no doubt in consequence — less individual, 
less absorbing, monopolizing, overwhelming, less 
personal. Rodin's work is drenched in sentiment, 
and sentiment so personally felt as to have been 
expressed with the utmost singleness and concen- 
tration of enthusiasm. The most unsympathetic 
observer must note this, however much he may 
himself prefer quality to feeling, and in the pres- 
ence of feeling manifested in unfamiliar guise re- 
coil in self-defence upon the familiar trades-union 
standard of "regularity.'' What one observes in 
a work by M. Paul Dubois, let us say, is quality. 
As quality it may be admirable or insignificant, 
but its appeal is to one's sense for the abstract, the 



EODII^- AISTD THE EN^STITUTE 251 

general. It happens that it comes from the sculp- 
tor^s connoisseurship, from his sympathetic appre- 
ciation of the way in which the Renaissance sculp- 
tors treated their projects or solved their problems. 
But it does not so much matter where an artist 
gets his effect as what he gets. M. Dubois gets, as 
I say, quality. Rodin gets feeling. The differ- 
ence is exactly antipodal — or would be if there 
were not an immense amount of quality also in 
the expression of Rodin^s feeling. 

Ill 

The distinction between Rodin^s art and the art 
of the Institute sculptors can be expressed very 
definitely, I think, by saying that one is inspired 
by nature and guided by tradition, and the other 
inspired by tradition and guided by nature. It is 
difficult to reprehend too strongly the error and 
the evil of counsels sometimes addressed to Ameri- 
can artists in especial, to abandon their artistic 
patrimony and ^^be themselves ^^ — the insistence, 
in other words, upon an originality that is a pure 
abstraction and is characteristic of no great artist 
since the evolution of art began. Everything de- 
pends upon the way in which one makes use of his 
patrimony. There is an eternal opposition between 
using it in a routine and mechanical way, drawing 



252 FEENCH AKT 

the interest on it, so to speak, from time to time 
on the one hand, and on the other reinvesting it 
according to the dictates of one's own feeling and 
faculty. This latter is what every great artist has 
done. It is the Greek method. It is what Phidias 
did with the ^ginetan tradition. It is what Dona- 
tello did with the Greek models that research un- 
earthed at the Renaissance. It is what Raphael 
did with the material he found at the Baths of 
Titus, as well as that furnished him by his im- 
mediate painting predecessors. It is what Rodin 
has done with what his forerunners of Greece and 
Italy have devised him. It is exactly what the 
Institute sculpture does not do. 

The Institute sculpture occupies a very distin- 
guished eminence in the estimation of every com- 
petent critic. It has, as a school, no rival in 
modern times. Fancy comparing Dubois, Merci6, 
Barrias, Le Feuvre, with any English, Italian, or 
German school of professional sculptors. But to 
speak of it as a legitimate successor of and as on 
somewhat the same plane with the two other so- 
called schools with which only it is to be compared, 
the Greek and the Italian Renaissance, is to lose 
sight of both its qualities and its defects — its car- 
dinal qualities of style, taste, elegance, competence, 
and its radical defect of being inspired by tradition 
and guided by nature instead of inspired by nature 



RODIN^ AND THE INSTITUTE 253 

and guided by tradition, as I said. Closely con- 
sidered its artistic result lacks significance. It has 
no personal sap, savor, meaning. It is wonder- 
fully well done. But, in the last analysis, one 
must ask the question. Why do it at all, if you 
care so little about it ? Every one nowadays can 
see that this is true of many of the admirably 
equipped and in many respects admirable painters 
who have won distinction for the Institute but 
whose day is over. Why can they not see that it 
is true of the Institute sculpture ? Rodin's mis- 
sion has been to expose the insipidity of this kind 
of perfection, and to throw into sharp and bold 
relief against the contemporary French background 
of the sculpture inspired by and based on tradition, 
the ever living, ever new evocations of an original 
genius, corrected and chastened by tradition, but 
suggested, inspired, teased out of the imagination 
by Nature herself. 

At the same time, however it may be travestied 
by insipidity and petrified by convention, the feel- 
ing for perfection in and for itself remains a part 
of the artist's proper inspiration and the pursuit of 
it a part of his business. It is the counterweight 
of the interpretation of nature, in advocacy of 
which Eodin is so eloquently — and exclusively — 
enthusiastic. In an environment of aesthetic sys- 
tem and rigid regularization, such as that created 



254 FRENCH AET 

by the French Institute, it is not surprising that 
the protestantism of a temperament like Rodin^s 
should be equally rigorous. But there is something 
else beside nature, there is man. And deeply im- 
planted in man is the sense that inspires him with 
the love of perfection and the effort to attain it. 
Let him seek it in nature then, replies M. Rodin, 
he will find it nowhere else, least of all in his own 
formularies. Very well, one may rejoin, but in 
the first place seeking implies a standard of selec- 
tion, which your magnification of nature tends to 
forget, and in the second the necessity of selection 
once admitted, an acquaintance with the history 
of aesthetic selection, its theory and practice, is in- 
evitably to be deduced as a salutary and important 
corollary. The necessity of not taking nature in- 
discriminately as one finds it, I dare say, Rodin 
would admit, as a purely abstract proposition, at 
all events. But his talk naturally, I repeat, given 
his temperament and his environment, is exclu- 
sively magnification of nature. '' Nonsense," he 
says, according to M. Gabriel Mourey; '*^ there is 
no need of the imagination to be a great artist ; it 
is enough to observe nature, to be a patient work- 
man, and to have a little intelligence." The am- 
biguity is in the "little intelligence." Otherwise 
the remark is an abuse of language, of course. 
But within the radius of the Institute's influence 



EODI]^ AiS^D THE IIS^STITUTE 255 

to magnify nature is venial. And lie would, no 
doubt, maintain that whatever metaphysical posi- 
tion logic imposed on aesthetic philosophy in this 
matter, the artistes training should be general 
enough to render his selection instinctive. 

IV 

This theory and his practice are in perfect ac- 
cord. The study of tradition, acquaintanceship 
with the selective genius of the long line of ante- 
cedent artists, familiarity with what the G-reek, the 
mediaeval, the Renaissance artists saw in nature — 
culture, in a word — are not particularly apparent 
in Rodin^s sculpture, and they do not in themselves 
directly tend to produce art of which the note is 
life, personality, originality, vigor, intensity, vari- 
ety—the best in modern art, that is to say. They 
tend, however, to exalt the salutary, the serene, 
and the important principle of perfection, to keep 
its worship alive, to pass on its torch to the next 
hand. They tend to curb the violent, to restrain 
the exaggerated, to elevate the ignoble. In brief, 
the office of culture is the same in the province of 
art as it is elsewhere, the cultivation of the sense 
of perfection, the sense which nature with its in- 
completeness and its immense inorganic content 
of infinite suggestion cannot supply. The peril of 



266 FEENCH AET 

the pursuit of perfection is inanity, the peril of 
nature-worship is eccentricity. Opposite tempera- 
ments will always differ as to the comparative value 
of the two. And nothing is more characteristic of 
the present century, in which art has become self- 
conscious, than the breach into which this differ- 
ence has widened. On the one hand there is the 
tendency strikingly manifested, for example, in 
the circumstance that our age is the first to pre- 
serve and '^ restore^' the art of other epochs with 
a reverence not accorded to its own, and on the 
other the tendency universally affirmed to be spe- 
cifically modern, the tendency to independence and 
differentiation. There are, in fine, two masters 
which it is difficult for the artist to serve and 
render each his due without withholding it from 
the other. 

I think it is ''the greater inclination^' of the 
balance in Rodin^s hands toward a somewhat per- 
emptory and exclusive exaltation of nature, to an 
extent which eliminates the element of perfection, 
a distinct effort for which we are apt to associate 
with all art, that accounts in general for the sin- 
cere scepticism with which his sculpture is viewed 
by those whom it has not yet won. I can, to be 
sure, easily fancy his answer to this qualification 
of his artistic completeness. '' Perfection, '^ he 
would say, "is a chimera. You really have no 



EODI]^ AKD THE II^STITUTE 257 

notion of what you mean by it. As a matter of 
fact none of the great artists pursued it, except as 
instinctively they recognized suggestions of it in 
the nature which in proportion to their greatness 
they studied profoundly/^ And he would agree 
with Mr. Eakins — perhaps his closest parallel in 
this country — whom I remember remarking rather 
contemptuously: "The Greeks did n^t draw from 
the antique. ^^ As to Michael Angelo, to whom it 
is significant that he greatly prefers Donatello, he 
would maintain that it is either in spite of or in 
virtue of his defects rather than his qualities that 
he is so unduly admired as a sculptor — a conten- 
tion betraying a fairly pantheistic preference of 
the concrete to the abstract. 

In rejoinder one could surely assert that no one 
better than Rodin himself knows the practice of 
the greatest artists. He, at all events, is not an 
example of what may be attained without famili- 
arity with the line of tradition. How much or 
little it may have influenced him is " known only 
to the gods,^^ and though his practice must cer- 
tainly be held to illustrate his theory, there is to 
be borne in mind that incalculable quantity, "a 
little intelligence," which saves one from being 
"a mediocre artist" and which no study of nature 
can supply. M. Eodin would undoubtedly admit 
that to this end art is, if not an inspiration like 



258 FRENCH ART 

nature, an influence of stimulant, formative, re- 
straining, and instructive worth, and that famili- 
arity with the syntheses of nature that have stood 
the test of time has the value of culture in any 
field of effort. So far we are agreed, perhaps. 
But besides that, there is the extra-natural and 
wholly human aspiration for perfection, for the 
achievement of completeness in beauty, the neglect 
of which is now and then to be felt in Rodin's 
work. 

On the other hand one reason for the vogue that 
he has won lies on the surface. The present is an 
era of nature- worship, and Rodin deals with nature 
directly, exclusively, and copiously. No sculptor 
of modern or classic times has more completely 
familiarized himself with her secrets. So uncom- 
promising and so obvious is his point of view, and 
so antagonistic is it to that usually illustrated in 
modern sculpture, that it seems absolutely novel 
and original ; and a fresh point of view is, nowa- 
days, as welcome as naturalistic inspiration— after 
it has once succeeded in imposing itself. He does 
not express the idea of his figures or compositions 
by the conventional symbols common to most ar- 
tists, but by actual realization. He does not depend 
upon suggestion, but challenges the observer by 
the complete structural expression which may be 
called the keynote of his sculpture. He does not 



RODIN AND THE INSTITUTE 259 

rely upon the physiognomy to convey his idea of 
character, but expresses it with the entire physique. 
The gesture is derived from the form, the pose is 
dictated by the substance, so that both emphasize 
the character which controls them, instead of 
merely suggesting it in a conventional language of 
their own. Much modern sculpture might be dif- 
ferentiated, at least for those who inspect and ad- 
mire it, by the purely psychological expression that 
is given to it by the sculptor— that is to say, by a 
literary label. If the rest is well done, compe- 
tently executed, that is all that is asked. Every 
detail of Rodin^s sculpture is speaking. If it were 
knocked to pieces its fragments would still be in- 
teresting. But not only that — not only is its de- 
tail interesting as artistic reproduction of natural- 
istic detail, but it is all carefully studied as detail, 
and by no means insisted upon unduly to the 
detriment of the ensemble, of the idea, or whole, 
to be enforced. Perhaps no one in our time— 
painter or sculptor— has been able to present the 
actual breathing, human being so adequately, so 
palpably. His rendering of flesh alone singular- 
izes him among the sculptors of all time, I should 
say, and, technically considered, constitutes his 
supreme distinction. So far as science is concerned 
M. Eodin is more than a match for the best- 
equipped pupils that the Institute turns out. 



260 FEENCH ABT 

He handles clay as freely as an impressionist 
painter does pigments. His skill is quite unexam- 
pled, and one sees at once in looking at any of his 
works that technically he can do anything he 
chooses. His great distinction in this respect is 
that what he chooses to do is the interpretative 
representation of nature. He has none of the 
sculptor^s traditions as to what is fit subject for 
representation in form. Nature is his to work 
with as fully and abundantly as she is the least 
academic painter's. What he tries to do, what he 
succeeds beyond comparison in doing, is to express 
nature as forcibly as Eousseau or Manet can. For 
sculpture this — in the degree in which Rodin does 
it, at least— was in modern art a new thing. His 
range in this is extraordinary. It extends from 
the prettinesses of Clodion to the heroic works of 
— but really when it comes to heroic sculpture is 
there any one since Michael Angelo to whom Rodin 
can be compared? His little heads and figures and 
groups are exquisite beyond any works of the 
purely dilettante sculptor, even of the sculptor of 
the rank and class of Cellini, because they are very 
far from being the exercise of the instinct of pre- 
ciosity but are as solidly based on the reality of 
nature as Barye's animals or Donatello's men. 



EODIIS" AKD THE USTSTITUTE 261 



It is Eodin^s temperament^ however, not his 
modelling, superb as his modelling is, that is the 
conspicuous, the interesting, the noteworthy thing 
to be discerned in his work. His imagination is 
one of the most fertile and at the same time most 
original, most particular that has ever expressed 
itself plastically in the whole history of art — not 
French art alone. To express his imaginings, 
however personal, he uses, it is true, the infinitely 
varied material of concrete nature and the mate- 
rial world, and in a way which often appears to 
elicit its suggestiveness rather than embody its 
echo in his own susceptibility. But it is neverthe- 
less true that his work shows a wealth of imagina- 
tiveness. And when to this variety of invention 
we add the sentiment with which, as I have already 
said, his sculpture is saturated, it need hardly be 
added that his temperament is thoroughly roman- 
tic and poetic. Eealistic as his work is in fidelity 
to the form and substance of nature, it is tempera- 
mentally as far as possible removed from that nat- 
uralistic inspiration which is half science. The 
*^ Balzac'^ has been enough discussed, but it may 
be pointed out that whatever its success or failure, 
it emphasizes the temperamental side of Rodin's 



262 FEENCH AET 

genius, which is here unbalanced by the determi- 
nation and concreteness usually so marked in his 
work. Compare it for sentiment, for grandeur, 
for elevation, with such a work as M. Fremiet^s 
^^Meissonier," the last word in Institute realism. 
Of the Porte de TEnfer, which has absorbed Rodin 
for nearly twenty years, one may say without hy- 
perbole that imaginatively it is adequately Dan- 
tesque, at least on its horrent side, and it has 
depths of poignant sweetness and intense pathos 
within its beautiful arabesque of line and boss that 
render it unique. The '^ Calais Bourgeois " shows 
a wholly novel and moving treatment of a problem 
as large and dijB&cult as any a sculptor can be called 
upon to solve. The busts of Mme. Morla, of Vic- 
tor Hugo, of Dalou, of Legros, of Laurens, of a 
score of other celebrities, attest a striking individ- 
uality in taking and treating the most hackneyed 
of all sculptural endeavors — the portrait bust. 
The " Saint Jean,^' and " Adam " and ^' Eve,^^ and 
the '^Age d'Airain," the monuments of Claude 
Lorrain, of Bastien-Lepage, of Victor Hugo, of 
Puvis de Chavannes, are equally illustrative of 
versatility upon a high plane of imaginative effort 
and natural inspiration. 



EODIN AND THE INSTITUTE 263 



VI 

There are three objections that I have heard 
made to Eodin^s sculpture, none of them, it seems 
to me, wholly sound. In the first place, he is said 
to have a defective sense of design. This is easy to 
say and therefore tempting ; nothing is lazier than 
the critical faculty. But there is a distinction to be 
made. It is true that he is not a great composer in 
the sense of composing with native zest and seeing 
a complicated ensemble first of all and with intuitive 
imagination. In a great composer like Eaphael, 
for instance, the composition is the first thing one 
notes ; one seizes at once the evident fact that com- 
position is the element of art for which he was born, 
in which he expresses his genius most freely and 
directly, with the least friction. Yet, I do not 
think it can be said that the Porte de TEnfer is 
not a great composition. It is distributed on 
large lines and the treatment of the theme is bal- 
anced and counterweighted with a curious felicity 
which serves to co-ordinate and throw into artis- 
tic relief the tumultuous hurly-burly and tremen- 
dous anarchy of the immensely various elements. 
These latter perhaps make more impression than 
the whole does ; that is all one can reasonably say. 
If Rodin had been as instinctively drawn to the 



264 FRENCH ART 

ensemble as he was to its elements he would not 
have been so long in executing it ; whereas, long 
as he has been at work upon it, it is still far from 
finished. But it would infallibly have been less 
impressive, and as it stands now it demonstrates 
that instead of having a defective sense of design 
its sculptor has a defiant disregard of conventional 
composition. So have the Japanese, so far as re- 
gards the Institute formulae. To say that Chapu's 
'' Berry er,'' for example, or any one of the many 
imitations of the simple and elementary symmetry 
of the Medicean tombs since Michael Angelo's day, 
shows a sharper sense for design than the Dante 
door is like saying that Giotto^s round '^ ^' is a 
finer composition than the *' Last Judgment," or 
that the Greek temple excels in design the Cathe- 
dral of Amiens, or the cell the organism. The 
*' Calais Bourgeois " is another thing. Its defiance 
of convention seems to me a outrance. But I con- 
fess it interests me less to consider how much the 
apparent helter-skelter of its nevertheless wonder- 
fully skilful composition displeases my probably 
convention-steeped desire for symmetry than to 
endeavor to appreciate Eodin^s point of view and 
to decide whether he has forcibly illustrated it. I 
think he has. The history of the monument ex- 
plains it. The Calaisiens wanted one of more 
or less conventional, even pyramidal shape. " In 



EODII!^ AKD THE tN-STITUTE 265 

that case/^ said Eodin, ''get some one else. I will 
represent those citizens setting forth on their er- 
rand, not perhaps as they actually did set forth, 
but as a rational imagination penetrated with the 
sentiment of the incident may justifiably conceive 
the incident and enforce its sentiment — its proper 
and pertinent sentiment and not some other ; or I 
will not do the work at all/^ The result is inter- 
esting — wholly successful or not as time or the 
contemporary professional judgment, whose ver- 
dicts have sometimes erroneously been assumed to 
be identical, may decide — but to the amateur, the 
layman, with his technical ignorance and conse- 
quent irresponsibility, deeply interesting, touch- 
ing, and elevated. 

VII 

It is penetrated in any event with the sense of 
reality — the mark, I think, of serious effort at 
the present day. And this brings me to the second 
reproach addressed to Eodin, his lack of feeling 
for ideal sculpture, as it is called. I confess I am 
not quite sure that I know what ''^ ideal sculpture"^ 
means. It cannot mean imaginative sculpture, 
because this is exactly what Rodin's sculpture is, 
and exactly what the Institute sculpture, which 
he thinks insipid, is not. And the Institute sculp- 



266 FRENCH ART 

ture is called ideal and Rodin's realistic. Rodin 
is, it is true, an uncompromising realist, but to 
find a lack of ideality in this fact is to betray 
mental confusion. What exactly do we mean by 
the ideal element in a work of art when we speak 
strictly ? We mean the element in virtue of which 
it corresponds closely and cordially to the image 
or idea created or awakened by it in our own mind. 
In art "the ideal" is n't merely what we 'd like 
but don't have. It is as present in a still-life by 
Vollon or Chardin as in a composition by Puvis de 
Chavannes. Reality is just as competent to fur- 
nish it as insubstantiality is — it is as subject to 
the actual vision as to the dream and as much the 
material of the imagination as are certain imagin- 
ings. It is beyond the reach of the photograph 
because the photograph gives us the aspect of the 
object and does not establish relations with our 
idea of it — which is not to say, by the way, that 
a good photograph is not often an exceedingly 
superior thing, though probably because the cam- 
era is handled by an artist like a brush or a model- 
ling tool. 

A distinction less liable to confusion, I think, 
than that usually made between the real and the 
ideal, would be that between the concrete and the 
abstract. Probably what is meant by ideal sculp- 
ture is abstract sculpture — sculpture dealing with 



eodIjS- AiS^D THE i:n^stitute 267 

abstractions, personifications, muses, divinities, 
sentiments, etc., etc. ^ow Eodin's neglect of this 
sort of sculpture is indeed yery marked. But he 
has the immense advantage over the Institute, 
where, as he says, they have recipes for senti- 
ments, of being in harmony with the tendency of 
his time. Nothing has more clearly characterized 
the evolution of the human mind since the days 
of the Greeks than its steady progress in appetence 
from the abstract to the concrete. The rise of the 
individual, the development of the scientific spirit, 
every trait of the modern world and mind empha- 
sizes this evolution. In the characteristic art of 
our day, the ideal is sought for in the concrete. 
It savors somewhat of absurdity to seek it in the 
abstract at a time when the human spirit is no 
longer in complete touch with the abstract. The 
notion that it is perilous for art to yield anything 
to the scientific spirit is seen to be puerile the mo- 
ment one recognizes, as one must, that the entire 
energy of the era is concentrated upon what is to 
be discerned in, argued from, and inspired by the 
tangible, the real, the substantial. If there be 
any innate contradiction between art and science, 
certainly art is bound to get the worst of it, be- 
cause science is the best thing going. There is 
no such contradiction. The proof is that science 
is pursued artistically. Why not pursue art scien- 



268 fre:n^ch aet 

tificallj? I should, say there could be no question 
that Rodin's art is eminently scientific. He knows 
more than any other sculptor about articulations 
and attachments, derivations, action, correlations, 
and co-ordinations. But, for being studious and 
scientific it is none the less art, none the less ideal. 
His anatomy is always artistically expressive, his 
arrangements always adjusted to the end of beauty 
— whether of the beauty that resides in force, or 
of that in which charm predominates over power, 
or of that which merely accentuates the essence of 
abiding and impressive reality that all concrete 
things contain in germ and are ready to yield up 
to the synthetist who sees their significance. 

VIII 

In" the third, place, Rodin's sculpture is accused 
by the conventional criticism of obtruding detail — 
not merely of that insistence upon detail which 
involves neglect of the ensemble, nor that which 
results in neglect of ideality, but a technical treat- 
ment which brings into undue and even grotesque 
salience the essentially trivial parts of a single fig- 
ure, for example, as well as the mere elements of a 
composition. He is said to be over fond of his 
anatomy, to care more for the charpente than the 
outline, to be blind to suavity, grace, delicacy, in 



EODHS" AXD THE IIS^STITUTE 269 

his impetuous energy of expression. The back of 
his " Saint Jean " seems to the conventional sense 
a mass of corrugations,, the occiput of his Hugo 
bust a surface dotted with impossible and acci- 
dental protuberances. In a word, his works are 
esteemed ''^ unfinished" — the great word of phi- 
listine censure. An answer to this is comprised in 
M. Taine^s definition of a work of art before cited 
— namely, the representation of a character more 
completely than it is found in nature. Victor 
Hugo's head probably did not possess the nodosi- 
ties with which Eodin has endowed it, but Eodin^s 
treatment has expressed its character artistically, 
by the relief it giyes to its essential and the sub- 
ordination it imposes upon its accidental traits. 
Of course any Italian or G-erman professor of sculp- 
ture could produce a more exact replica as regards 
form, but incontestably in this way he would leave 
out the Hugo. 

One of his admirers, Mr. Charles Quentin, cites 
Rodin's views of ^'finish" as follows: "There is 
no finish possible in a work of art, since it is na- 
ture and nature knows no finish, being infinite; 
therefore one stops at some stage or other when he 
has put into his work all he sees, all he has sought 
for, all he cares to put, or all he particularly 
wants ; but one could really go on forever and see 
more to do." Here again the attitude is more in- 



270 FEENCH ART 

teresting than the philosophy, literally interpreted, 
is sound. A work of art is not nature, it is the 
artist's impression or idea of nature to begin with, 
and in addition penetrated with his feeling — if he 
is an artist of temperament like Rodin. And it is 
just because nature is infinite that art exists — as a 
finite suggestion of infinity, an organic, personal 
and circumscribed image of inexhaustible objective 
incompleteness. But when these truths are used 
to legitimate the literal and disown the suggestive 
in art, one can understand a disposition to even ex- 
aggerated exaltation of what is unduly neglected 
and what, practically speaking, after all, is for a 
modern artist the one important thing to bear in 
mind. 

The modern artist, especially the French artist, 
is very disproportionately more familiar with the 
discoveries of art than he is with the secrets of na- 
ture. The '^culture conquests'' in his particular 
field he has at his finger ends. His besetting 
temptation is to rely on them, to adapt them to 
his purposes, to content himself with a mere re- 
arrangement of them. He lives in an '^artistic 
atmosphere," outside of which his inspiration fails. 
The counsel he needs is to steep himself — edu- 
cated, not to say conventional, as he is — in the 
influences and study the suggestions of nature, to 
feel his formularies in his fingers, if need be, but 



EODIISr A]^D THE INSTITUTE 271 

not bother his brain with them in the actual trans- 
action of his work. Of course, the artist abso- 
lutely ignorant of art is absolutely negligible — as 
negligible as the boy with his slate or the savage 
with his slab of wood. There are such from time 
to time and they have the vogue and recognition 
proper to the freak — the freak in art, whom no 
knowledge or love of nature can essentially miti- 
gate. But it remains true that where art is prac- 
tised and talked about, where artists are experts 
and the public is a connoisseur, there cannot be 
too much talk of and devotion to nature — in the 
interests of art itself. 

Therefore such approximate language as that of 
M. Eodin^s about art^s having no finish because 
nature, which art is, is infinite, is, from any prac- 
tical point of view, stimulating and suggestive. 
Corot might have — may have — talked in this 
way of his beautifully generalized landscapes. 
Homer Martin used to very pithily and quaintly, I 
remember. When some one inquired once if a 
certain picture of his were finished he asked : " Do 
you mean am I going to do anything more to it ? " 
But this point of view is particularly pertinent in 
the matter of sculpture — of which for so many 
persons ''^ finish ^"^ is an inseparable, an integral 
quality. It reminds one — as Kodin^s work itself 
constantly does — that sculpture generalizes, that 



272 FEENCH ART 

its potentialities are not exhausted in the con- 
stricted epitome which ''^form"^ seems to imply to 
some tastes; that, besides manifesting itself as 
outline, it exists as volume, as actual bulk im- 
gregnated with the abstract qualities which make 
it fine art — grace, force, charm of distribution 
and relation — and which in general are ascribed 
solely to the silhouette when they are not indeed 
credited to the physiognomy. 

Considered in this way there is no place to stop, 
there is no possibility of " finish, ^^ the envelope is 
merged in, identical with, the form, and except 
where texture has a value the form has no surface. 
When the surface has a sculptural value either to 
express quality or for contrast, Eodin, as a matter 
of fact, treats it as scrupulously and explicitly — 
often as '^ smoothly ^^ — as the most superficial 
devotee of the superficies of sculpture could desire. 
In fine, the most one can say, I think, about the 
inadequacy of Rodin's technical '^ finish '' is that 
his devotion to expression here, as elsewhere, per- 
haps blinds him to an occasional opportunity of 
decorating sufficiency of expression, of statement, 
with that touch of purely sensuous and irresponsi- 
ble agreeableness which adds nothing — save pure 
delight! — to its force or significance. There is 
now and then perhaps a certain sacrifice which 
seems inspired by austerity, but which really springs 



RODLN^ Al^jy THE ESTSTITUTE 273 

from tlie hypnosis of nature over the senses as well 
as the soul of her worshipper. '' It has often hap- 
pened to me before certain models/' he says, ^^'to 
stop short in disappointment. At the first glance 
they did not please me. Yet, after making a con- 
scious effort, I perceived in the course of my work 
that there was an element of unperceived beauty 
in these beings that I despised. And at the end 
of a few minutes, from haying been disgusted I 
became enthusiastic.-" What is the use of talking 
of the pursuit of perfection and of " finish ''' as an 
element of perfection, to an artist who feels in that 
way? To him the ^^ pursuit of perfection" must 
seem a euphemism for the manufacture of clock- 
tops. 

Still it is incontestable that but for the Institute, 
French clock-tops, which are admirable, would 
be very much less so. And, indeed, one is forced 
to remember, whatever one's conclusions as to 
either theory or practice, that the moral which 
further consideration of Eodin really enforces is 
that which I have already drawn: His is as 
strongly characterized and artistic an individual- 
ity, as puissant a personality, as one can con- 
ceive. Yet he was developed, as our modern 
phrase is, in an environment that is the most 
strictly and narrowly academic that has ever been 
known. He constitutes an a posteriori demonstra- 



274 FEENCH ART 

tion of the value of an academy, of which the a 
l^riori demonstration is that original or even eccen- 
tric geniuses can only arise in a community which 
by some concerted means and central agency — 
such as an academy — brings art into such promi- 
nence and popularity that it becomes a common, a 
recognized, and a prized pursuit. How shall the 
few be chosen unless the many are called? 



APR 7 A9f^U 



